Who is Sendhil Mullainathan? What were his research findings regarding judges’ bail decisions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sendhil Mullainathan is a professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago. In 2017, Mullainathan and colleagues conducted a study about judges’ ability to predict defendants’ likelihood of committing another crime. What did they find out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Keep reading for more about the experiment Mullainathan ran and his findings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
On a typical Thursday in Brooklyn, Judge Solomon was presiding over his courtroom. His primary responsibility for the day was arraignments. He had to see every defendant who had been arrested in the last 24 hours, look at their criminal history, listen to the testimony of both the prosecution and the defense, and then decide if the defendant would be offered bail and the chance to be released from custody. In short, Judge Solomon had to look a perfect stranger in the eye, assess his character, and decide if he deserved his freedom. <\/strong>But does looking a person in the eye actually help you judge his nature?<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n A team from the University of Chicago, led by Sendhil Mullainathan, set out to answer that question. The experiment went like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The computer was <\/strong>much <\/em><\/strong>better than human judges at determining a defendant\u2019s likelihood of committing another crime.<\/strong> The study found that judges were not only setting their standards for release too low, but they were also actually mis-ranking many defendants completely. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is important to note that the human judges that presided over these cases had three resources available to them when making their bail decision:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mullainathan\u2019s computer only <\/em>had one of these three resources<\/strong>\u2014the record of each defendant. Yet the machine still beat human judges when it came to making bail decisions. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Who is Sendhil Mullainathan? What were his research findings regarding judges’ bail decisions? Sendhil Mullainathan is a professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago. In 2017, Mullainathan and colleagues conducted a study about judges’ ability to predict defendants’ likelihood of committing another crime. What did they find out? Keep reading for more about the experiment Mullainathan ran and his findings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":22208,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,9,160],"tags":[69],"class_list":["post-22154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethics","category-psychology","category-science","tag-talking-to-strangers","","tg-column-two"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Results <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Translating the Results<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n