People who sign consent forms feel more trapped - not more empowered - than those who give consent verbally, according to new research by Vanessa Bohns, the Braunstein Family Professor in the ILR School, and co-author Roseanna Sommers of the University of Michigan Law School.
Consent forms have proliferated in recent years, thanks to an unlikely alliance between institutions seeking legal protection and advocates hoping to empower the vulnerable with knowledge of their rights. This growing formalization of consent, however, has several unintended consequences, Bohns said.
"There is this idea that if we make consent more formal by writing up a consent form and making sure everyone is on board, people will be able to make a mindful choice to agree voluntarily. But what we're actually finding is that signing a document makes people feel that they can't go back on their choice," Bohns said. "So, in the end, people feel more locked into a choice after the fact, even if the form says explicitly they can change their minds."
In the paper, "Forms of Commitment: Comparing Written and Verbal Consent in Three Psychological Experiments," published in the Journal of Legal Studies, Bohns and Sommers found that obtaining consent in writing rather than verbally is counterproductive to having signers feel free to withdraw consent.
Bohns and Sommers, who study consent and compliance, argue that consent forms are likely to activate people's contract schemas - mental scripts people implicitly call upon whenever they encounter documents that resemble contracts. The problem is that these schemas come with psychological baggage.
"Even when a consent form doesn't list any consequences - you're basically just making a promise - signing something in writing changes a person's understanding of the situation," Bohns sad. "Suddenly, it seems like it's not just a promise; it seems like a binding contract."
To test their hypothesis, Bohns and Sommers conducted two experiments in which participants gave either oral or written consent to have the content of their phones searched.
Participants then completed a questionnaire that measured their feelings about their interaction with the experimenter, including trust in the experimenter; the perceived freedom to refuse; and how much they deliberated over the decision to turn over their phones.
The results showed that participants in the written consent group were marginally more likely to hand over their phones and reported feeling significantly less free to refuse the request than those who gave oral consent. They were also more likely to say they handed over their phones "without thinking."
"As a society, we've disconnected signing consent forms from the act of reading and understanding what we are agreeing to," Bohns said. "Everywhere we go, we're presented with forms and told to sign them, and we think, 'Well, I guess I have to sign this.'"
In another experiment, the researchers asked participants to evaluate a scenario involving either oral or written consent in one of five legal domains: consent to a search by a police officer; consent to a medical procedure; consent to being photographed in the nude; consent to loaning a car to a friend; and consent to sex. In each scenario, the consenter initially agreed, then later changed their mind.
Even though the form in the written consent scenarios explicitly stated that signatories retained the right to revoke consent, participants felt that written consent was more binding and less revocable than oral consent.
"Roseanna and I have been trying for a while to come up with situations that make people feel freer to say no, so that when they do say yes, it feels more consensual and less coerced - more like they had a free choice," Bohns said. "This was meant to be one of those situations, but it didn't work. Luckily, we still learned something interesting and important."
Study participants also said they felt less confident that an individual's rights had been violated when the experimenter ignored their withdrawal of written consent. They believed only slightly, from a moral standpoint, that those who consent in writing owe it to their counterparties to not back out. They also perceived less hope of legal recourse for those who initially consented in writing.
Finally, consenters who signed a form were somewhat more likely to be seen as having no one to blame but themselves if they were unhappy with the consequences.
"We assume if someone signed something, it's because they knew what they were signing, and if they are unhappy with the terms later, it's their own fault for failing to read before signing," Bohns said. "But in reality, very few of us actually read the stuff we sign."
Julie Greco is director of communications for the ILR School.
