Science

Study revealing why legal contracts are hard to read wins Ig Nobel Prize

A study revealing legal contracts are hard to read because they are poorly written won the Literature Ig Nobel Prize this year
A study revealing legal contracts are hard to read because they are poorly written won the Literature Ig Nobel Prize this year

Running for over 30 years, the Ig Nobel Prizes serve as a good-natured counterpoint to the sometimes stuffy and impenetrable Nobel Prizes. The Ig Nobels are not about ridiculing absurd research but instead they celebrate the stranger side of science – focusing on those discoveries that can make you laugh and then make you think.

This year’s winners span 10 categories, covering a variety of sciences, from Physics, Biology and Medicine, to Engineering, Economics and Literature. During the award ceremony acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds, in the spirit of challenging scientists to succinctly encapsulate their findings.

One highlight this year came from the winner of the Literature prize. A trio of cognitive scientists set out to investigate a classic problem: why are legal documents so notoriously hard to understand?

In a paper titled “Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives processing difficulty in legal language,” the researchers deployed a variety of analytical techniques to come to the conclusion that it’s not necessarily your fault if you can’t understand many legal documents. Turns out bad writing makes many legal papers unnecessarily complex.

In the spirit of clarity the researchers each only offered a single word to sum up their findings during the award ceremony. Those words were "superfluous," "gratuitous" and "esoteric."

Another winner that perfectly encapsulated the weird science at the core of the Ig Nobels took out the Biology prize. For their study, a pair of Brazilian biologists investigated how some species of scorpions die of constipation after losing their tails.

Known as autonomy, the technique is a defense mechanism where the scorpions detach their tails to escape a predator. The new research discovered that after losing their tail, the scorpions live for several months, still able to mate, before they ultimately die of constipation.

Other highlights from this year’s winners include the Engineering prize for research studying the most efficient way to turn a doorknob, the Medicine prize for a study demonstrating how adding ice cream to certain types of pediatric cancer therapies can improve outcomes, and the Art History prize awarded to scientists who self-tested ancient Mayan medicinal enemas.

Watch the complete, highly entertaining award ceremony below.

Source: Improbable Research

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4 comments
Brian M
A lot more fun than the Nobel prizes - and often more relatable to the average Joe and Jane public.

Oh and the real reason for why legal documents are hard to read, it generates more business for the law companies!
Expanded Viewpoint
But... the "legalese" in any alleged contract, contradicts and voids itself via the Void for Vagueness Doctrine!! If you cannot comprehend it, then you cannot be held subordinate to it, otherwise, it's a violation of our right to Due Process. The legal system cannot be used as any kind of a weapon against the ones who are not able to know what is going on in it. But yet, it is so used.
FB36
Not just legal documents but also patent documents are extremely hard to understand for general public!
I do not doubt that they all could be re-written in an understandable way (which would be extremely beneficial in many ways!) , if really wanted!!
(Maybe an AI could be trained to convert them to understandable language for general public?)
(AI automatically converting from common language to those special languages/formats would be also greatly beneficial for general public!
Imagine if anybody could create their own patent applications (& defenses/letters) w/o needing help from expensive patent attorneys!)
Daishi
This hits home for me a bit. I gave my lawyer a paragraph to write into a couple page contract and after ~6 months, $20k, and fighting over every line in it what is left is somehow more ambiguous and harder to understand than my original text. I wish I would have just done my own documents or put less trust in them to complete the sections I needed to be clearer. Sometimes there can be value in restating a point or paraphrasing it using different word choice so it is less open to interpretation. Without doing that there may be 2-3 ways to potentially interpret the meaning of a statement depending who you ask.