What Should Technologists Know about Power, Consent and Privacy? Part 1

The Extended Mind recently hosted an event with Vanessa Bohns, a social psychologist who has done extensive research on the psychology of requests. Her research illuminates the human tendency to be agreeable and the difficulty with which we say no. And it has implications for the ways that we receive requests to share our data every day, which is why we invited Vanessa to speak about her work.

Her findings reveal that people are compliant even with requests to disclose information, which may in part be due to the anticipation of difficult questions such as “What are you hiding?” or “Why don’t you trust me?”

In a series of blog posts, we’ll outline some of the highlights of the event and discuss the consequences of these social and power dynamics on informed consent, transparency, choice, and how technologists can avoid pitfalls in product design. In this, the first of two blogs, we’ll review why we are so likely to say yes to requests.

The human default is to be agreeable

99% of people consent to voluntary searches by police (Burke, 2016). This nearly unanimous consent on the part of civilians calls into question whether the people are being offered a legitimate choice.

In order to study this phenomenon, Vanessa performed a research study in which participants were asked if they would unlock and hand over their phones. Strikingly, 97% of people agreed. This behavior is explained by the difficulty with which people say no to requests. In Vanessa’s own words:

“Our human default is to be agreeable, to not cause problems, to not say no.”

Not only is it the default for most people to say yes, but it can be painful, scary, or even consequential for people to say no. This may be acutely experienced in exchanges with police where there are power dynamics at play. Per Vanessa:

“Saying no, rejecting someone, is also incredibly difficult and painful. It risks
damaging the relationship. It risks insinuating something negative about that other person. It risks looking like a bad, uncooperative person potentially or even risks, in some cases, safety concerns.”

In her study, she was able to see the reality of people’s consent not lining up with their actual wishes through their reactions. Oftentimes, participant’s actual reactions to requests, or their own response to the request, would arise once the experimenter left the room.

“In the cell phone study in particular, it’s funny, people have very emotional reactions … We would ask them and they were always confused and a little bit in shock and like, ‘Uh, okay.’ They would hand it over. Then in more than one case, our experimenter would walk out of the room [and the] person was up out of their chair ready to be like, ‘Wait, what did I just do?’” — Vanessa Bohns

Requests are particularly challenging when made in person because of social pressure.

“I think the best way to do that is really to give people that time and space to have that extra beat, to think about it, to make a mindful decision, yes or no.” — Vanessa Bohns

For most people, formulating a legitimate answer to a request requires time and space away from the requester. This moment of separation helps with overcoming the default reaction of saying ‘yes.’

Takeaways

These findings may have interesting impacts for AR glasses and asking for consent to record those in your vicinity. If you approached everyone you wanted to record and asked their consent, everyone would very likely agree. But would it be true agreement or ‘human default’ agreement?

The tendency for people to default to ‘yes’ to requests also means that people may be more likely to say yes than no to requests to share their data, even if data sharing is not something they may not want to do — read more on the Privacy Paradox here.

In part two of this series, we’ll discuss the difference between legal consent and psychological consent, as well how defaults influence user behavior. You can read Part 2 of this series here.

To read more about Vanessa’s research, you can check out her website, or her new 2021 book You have more influence than you think.

Resources

Burke, A. S. (2016). Consent Searches and Fourth Amendment Reasonableness. Florida Law Review, 67(2). https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1247&context=flr