Also interesting is "Impossibly Hungry Judges". Many of these correlation effects are paradoxically so strong that they they _cannot_ be the true explanation.
"The phenomenon of favorable decisions peaking after a meal break is likely an artifact of the order of case presentation. It is not evidence that meal breaks affect the boards’ decisions."
Yup. Even ignoring the lack of randomization, there’s another issue with the hungry judges paper that should have raised some eyebrows.
They fit a model using both the case order (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc) and the time elapsed. Either is significantly related to the case’s outcome, but when both are included, the rank explains away the time elapsed. This is obviously not compatible with increasing hunger/decreasing blood sugar, since those should depend on wall-time.
https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833.full