CAREER: Designing, Developing, and Evaluating Consent Technologies to Reduce Unwanted Interpersonal Behavior

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Flint, Flint MI

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this CAREER award is to develop nuanced ways to express and assess consent in online spaces with the goal of reducing harmful interactions. Consent is important when people interact, especially in contexts such as relationships where unwelcome behaviors might become physical or sexual harms. Often these harms are not intentional, but occur because of misperceptions of consent: for instance, when people make assumptions about other people's comfort with certain behaviors. These harms occur online as well as offline, as relationships can be enacted in a range of systems from discussion forums to dating sites to virtual worlds, while existing tools for managing behavior such as language filters or contact blockers do not address the underlying issue of helping people establish agreement to interpersonal behavior. This project seeks to fundamentally transform approaches to preventing harms that happen unintentionally through designing, developing, and evaluating use of consent technologies: devices, applications, and interfaces for giving and receiving permission around interpersonal behavior. The knowledge produced through this project will benefit the public through creation of entirely new approaches to reducing harms like sexual violence, ultimately leading to a safer society. The research plan is organized around three main activities. The first involves new computer-mediated consent models that explicitly address the actions of humans and technology in determining consent around interpersonal behaviors. These consent models would be developed through bringing together consent experts and technology users from demographics at disproportionate risk of being either victims or sources of sexual violence. The second activity involves development of interpersonal consent technologies created in collaboration with anticipated users to discover factors driving user acceptance and usability, including in emerging mediums such as augmented reality and virtual reality. The third activity includes empirical studies of the consent technologies' impacts on interpersonal behavior in settings in which individuals looking for romantic and sexual partners will use the technologies across online and in-person interactions and then report on their experiences. Along with the research, the project team will develop educational materials for both undergraduate students and the general public to increase awareness of the problem and the work. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.