Bias against Black defendants emerges only after judges suffer emotional shocks

Evidence

Eren and Mocan (2018), however, showed that if the sentencing date in juvenile court cases in Louisiana happened to be during the week following a surprise loss of the Louisiana State University (LSU) football team, defendants received longer sentences—and this impact was driven by judges who received their undergraduate degrees from LSU. Importantly, the authors showed that, disregarding the impact of football games, there was no evidence of discrimination (in the sense of Equation (1)): the race of the defendant had no impact on judicial decisions after controlling for relevant case and defendant attributes. However, after a surprising LSU loss, racial bias emerged: the impact on sentence length following an upset loss was borne by Black defendants, suggesting an implicit bias against Blacks that emerged only when the judge had suffered an emotional shock. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 754

Categorization

• XREF: This directly bears on the reader’s question of whether measured bias diverges from baseline professed behavior — here no discrimination absent emotional arousal, bias emerges after a shock. Pairs usefully with implicit-association findings elsewhere in this book.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘triggered bias’ pattern — egalitarian-seeming institutions (courts showing zero race effect on average) conceal latent bias that any emotional shock or threat activates — connects directly to whether professed impartiality predicts measured bias.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 754