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 authoritativ enature 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.
Human language is expressive because it is compositional: the meaning of a sentence (semantics) can be inferred from its structure (syntax). It is commonly believed that language syntax and semantics are processed by distinct brain regions. Here we …
Over the last 50 years, there have been efforts on behalf of the U.S. government to simplify legal documents for society at large. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of how effective these efforts—collectively referred to as the …
This work contributes to debates around the nature of human cognition and specifically the origins of mathematics in humans. In studying the correlates of numerical ability among indigenous Bolivian people, we find that cultural factors play a strong role—particularly schooling and economic activity. We also find evidence of remote adults without formal schooling who develop specialized arithmetical competence around the number 5 (due to local economic demands), even when they may not do arithmetic effectively with smaller numbers. Psychological theorizing about the cognitive nature of number and the innate components that support it should be tuned to accommodate the existence of such diverse trajectories.
Why do lawyers write in such a convoluted manner? Across two pre-registered experiments, we find that lawyers (a) like laypeople, were less able to understand and recall “legalese” contracts than content of equivalent meaning drafted in a simplified register; and (b) rated simplified contracts as equally enforceable as legalese contracts, and rated simplified contracts as preferable to legalese contracts on several important dimensions. Contrary to previous speculation, these results suggest that lawyers who write in a convoluted manner do so as a matter of convenience and tradition as opposed to an outright preference, and that simplifying legal documents would be beneficial for lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
Language evolution is driven by pressures for simplicity and informativity; however, the timescale on which these pressures operate is debated. Over several generations, learners' biases for simple and informative systems can guide language …
Over the course of development, children misuse words in systematic ways. For example, young children under-extend terms (using *blanky* to only refer to their blanket) and slightly older children over-extend terms (using *doggy* for any four legged creature). In this paper, we formalize a model of conceptual development from first principles and implement it to explain children's behavior as they acquire kinship terms in four different languages/cultures (Pukapuka, English, Turkish & Yanomamo). We find that the broad patterns of 'mistakes' seen in children are predicted by our model of conceptual development. We describe how inductive biases, data-driven learning and the environment could give rise to these patterns including over-/under-extension, the characteristic-to-defining shift and the order of acquisition of kinship terms.
Although contracts and other legal documents have long been known to cause processing difficulty in laypeople, the source and nature of this difficulty has remained unclear. To better understand this mismatch, we conducted a corpus …
We hypothesize that contrast perception works as a visual heuristic, such that when speakers perceive a significant degree of contrast in a visual context, they tend to produce the corresponding adjective to describe a referent. The contrast …
Pragmatic theories and computational models of reference must account for people’s frequent use of redundant color adjectives (e.g., referring to a single triangle as ‘the blue triangle’). The standard pragmatic view holds that the informativity of a …