Bailing and Jailing the Fast and Frugal way. Or are the decisions made in Fast and Frugal way always right ?

This time we had to read articles about decision making in fast and frugal way. The article our group had to read and discuss was ‘Bailing and jailing the Fast and Frugal way’ Dhami and Ayton (2001). The main focus of the article was to review how magistrates make decisions about whether to release defendants on bail based on their previous crimes.  

We would think that magistrates are the people who would carefully consider their decisions, because defendants life and society's well-being depends on how well those decisions are made. Unfortunately, magistrates have to work under constraints such as time pressure. So usually their decisions are being criticized by organizations supporting victims, groups representing defendants and professional agencies such as prosecution agencies. The authors of the article tried to analyze more into depth  how and with what confidence those important decisions are made. They identified the different process models such as the due-process which should work towards reducing crime by minimizing the number of innocent people incorrectly convicted. My attention was drawn to the Fast and Frugal models. For example, the matching heuristic is a simple process model that do not search through all available information, but just through small subset of cues and base decision one cue only. One would think that decisions made based on these heuristics should be inaccurate and poorly made. However, those models are accurate and the evidence for Fast and Frugal models are as good as compensatory integration models.

The results of the study found that majority of magistrates showed inconsistency in their bail decision and they are usually influenced by defended and crime related cues. So simply saying most of the magistrates ‘did not bother’ to look at all the information they were provided with. And in the end their decision depended on their own experience and presumptions about particular individual appearance. However, all magistrates were highly confident that they had made the appropriate decisions. The findings of the article made me wonder whether the justice system is 'Justice' after all and made me to understand how highly social norms and presumptions can influence people's judgments.