Marco Spallas
Pronouns: He/Him
Research Mentor(s): Margaret Meyer
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program:
Authors:
Session: Session 4: 1:40 pm – 2:30 pm
Poster: 45
Abstract
Prior research, such as the Milgram experiment, has shown that people often consent to requests even if they don’t want to (Milgram,1963). In the present work, we explore perceptions of people complying with requests. We have developed a survey to ask participants what they think about certain ways people consent. Using transcripts and videos from an in-lab consent task, participants in our study (expected N = 100) watched, read, and listened to people provide their consent to handing over their unlocked phones to an experimenter. Participants then rated the consentees response on a variety of domains (e.g., politeness, directness, and voluntariness). We then compared these perceptions against the actual experiences of consent from the in-lab participants. We hypothesize that people’s true preferences (as indicated in a self-report measure) can be perceived by third-party raters via cues in their language choice, prosody, and body language. Moreover, we explore the accuracy of third-party viewers’ perceptions of consent, with the consentee’s actual willingness to comply. This research has broad implications, as people make and respond to requests every day. In scenarios where consent is high-stakes, such as a police encounter, these results could shed light on potential new interventions and methods of evaluating the “voluntariness” of consent.
