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Toward a Psychology of Consent

File(s)
Bohns23 Toward a psychology of consent.pdf (156.09 KB)
Permanent Link(s)
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/119829
Collections
ILR Articles and Chapters
Faculty Publications - Organizational Behavior
Author
Bohns, Vanessa
Abstract

Consent is central to many of today's most pressing social issues: What counts as sexual assault? Whom are the police allowed to search? Can they use people's data like that? Yet despite the fact that consent is in many ways an inherently psychological phenomenon, it has not been a core topic of study in psychology. Although domain-specific research on consent-most commonly, informed consent and sexual consent-is regularly published in specialty journals (e.g., methods and sex-research journals), consent has been largely ignored as a generalizable psychological phenomenon. This has meant that consent has been mostly excluded from "mainstream" psychology as a core topic of study. This omission is particularly striking given that psychologists have paid broad attention to related constructs, such as compliance, obedience, persuasion, free will, and autonomy, and that scholars in other fields, such as law and philosophy, have paid considerably more attention to the topic of consent, despite its uniquely psychological qualities. In this article, I argue that psychologists should embrace consent-in particular, the subjective experience of consent-as a core topic of study.

Date Issued
2022-03
Publisher
SAGE
Keywords
compliance
•
consent
•
obedience
•
persuasion
•
social influence
Related DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211040807
Previously Published as
Bohns, V. K. (2022). Toward a psychology of consent. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(4), 1093-1100.
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Rights URI
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Type
article

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