[ma2rten]

The study seemed not very convincing to me, at least the way it was described in the article. To summarize: they asked crowdworkers to write a law who used legalese, but not when writing news stories about it or when explaining the law. From that the researchers concluded that people use legalese to convey authority.

But what if people just imitated the writing style of existing laws, but not with the intention to make it authoritative but because that is what they understood their task to be?

[District5524]

I agree. Building on 200 Prolific answers and inventing names for their "own hypothesis" called "magic spell"? Odd. Lawyers have written like entire libraries on this subject, there are specialized journals examining the legal language used (e.g. in English: https://link.springer.com/journal/11196, https://www.languageandlaw.eu/jll, but there are probably separate journals for this in every language with 10M+ speakers, like https://joginyelv.hu/) I understand this is not about the lawyers' approach to the problem, even if the author has a law degree, but a "cognitive sciences" department trying their hands on a problem that is new for them. But it would have been helpful if they had at least attempted to provide a reference to some prior art in the legal field...