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Even laypeople use legalese

Eric Martínez,Francis Mollica,Edward Gibson

Published 2024 in Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

ABSTRACT

Significance Why are laws so complicated? Across two preregistered experiments, we found that people tasked with writing official laws wrote in a more convoluted manner than when tasked with writing unofficial legal texts of equivalent conceptual complexity. This tendency held constant, regardless of whether people wrote the document iteratively or from scratch. These results suggest law to be a rare exception to the general tendency in human language toward communicating efficiently, and that convoluted structures may be inserted to effectively signal the authoritative nature of the law, at the cost of increased reading difficulty. These results further suggest laws can be effectively simplified without a loss or distortion of communicative content.

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