Social Annotation Valence: The Impact on Online Informed Consent Beliefs and Behavior.

This work explores the effects of adding a computer-mediated social dimension, which inherently contains human emotions and opinions, to the consent deliberation process. We proposed that augmenting the consent deliberation process to incorporate multiple voices can enable individuals to capitalize on the knowledge of others, which brings to light questions, problems, and concerns they may not have considered on their own. We found that consent forms containing positive valence annotations are likely to lead participants to feel less informed and simultaneously more trusting of the organization seeking consent. In certain cases where participants spent little time considering the content of the consent form, participants exposed to positive valence annotations were even more likely to consent to the study. We suggest that these findings represent important considerations for the design of future electronic informed consent mechanisms.