Toward a Psychology of Consent

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Vanessa Bohns

Cornell University

room Bernard Ramanantsoa

Abstract:

Consent is central to many of today’s most pressing social issues: Whom are the authorities allowed to search? What counts as sexual assault? Can corporations use people’s data like that? Yet despite the fact that consent is in many ways an inherently psychological phenomenon with important management implications, it has not been a core topic of study in psychology or management science. This omission is particularly striking given that psychologists and organizational behavior scholars 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 distinctly psychological qualities. In this talk, I will present empirical work that examines the unique nature of the subjective experience of consent and downstream social and organizational outcomes. The long-term aim of this program of research is to establish a psychology of consent that helps to explain and shape a wide range of important contexts involving the protection of individual autonomy.