Construct · 6 fields · 14 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one name, six constructs Nearest construct by meaningautonomycompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to consent is autonomy.
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The agreement that forms a bargain, found in what each party outwardly did rather than in what either privately meant. The Restatement (Second) of Contracts of 1981 requires a manifestation of mutual assent to an exchange plus consideration (§17), says assent is ordinarily an offer met by an acceptance (§18), and holds that conduct counts as assent when the actor intends it and knows or has reason to know the other party may take it that way (§19). The older phrase "meeting of the minds" survives in opinions but the objective theory has governed since the late nineteenth century. Barnett's consent theory of 1986 makes this the ground of contractual obligation: a manifested intention to be legally bound. Consent here is a signal read by a reasonable counterparty, and a party who sends it is bound whether or not they meant it.[1][2]
The act by which a free person becomes subject to legitimate political authority. Locke argued in 1689 that no one can be subjected to the political power of another without their own consent, and then extended the idea to tacit consent, anyone enjoying the protection of a government's laws, down to travelling on its highways, has consented to it. Hume replied in 1748 that most people have never been asked and could not leave if they wished, so consent cannot be what actually grounds obedience. Simmons pressed the point in 1979: tacit consent requires that the person knew a choice was being made and could refuse at reasonable cost, and residence alone fails both tests. Consent here is a normative act that confers legitimacy, argued over rather than observed.[3][4][5]
An autonomous authorisation by a patient or participant of an intervention on their own body, given with understanding and without controlling influence. The Nuremberg Code of 1947 opened with the sentence that the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential; the Belmont Report of 1979 made respect for persons one of three principles and specified information, comprehension, and voluntariness as the elements of consent. Faden and Beauchamp's history of 1986 separated two meanings that the word runs together: consent as an autonomous act, and consent as whatever the institution's rules count as effective authorisation. Beauchamp and Childress carry the first meaning into their principles. Consent here is a moral transformation (it makes permissible what would otherwise be a wrong) and it is only as good as the understanding behind it.[6][7][8]
How the Belmont requirements translate when the participants are users of a platform whose data is collected at scale, often without any encounter with the researcher. Vitak, Shilton, and Ashktorab surveyed online-data researchers in 2016 and found broad agreement on principles and wide disagreement on practice, whether public posts require consent, whether a terms-of-service clause counts, whether a study can debrief people it never contacted. The construct sits between the medical one and the data-protection one and borrows from both: it asks for informed, voluntary authorisation but must obtain it from populations that cannot be enrolled one at a time. Consent here is a process the research community is still negotiating, and "public" is its contested boundary.[9]
One of six lawful bases for processing personal data, and the one the public sees most. Article 4(11) of the General Data Protection Regulation of 2016 defines it as a freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous indication of the data subject's wishes by a statement or a clear affirmative action, and Article 7 adds that the controller must be able to demonstrate it, that it must be as easy to withdraw as to give, and that it cannot be a hidden condition of a service. Utz and colleagues showed in 2019 that the design of a consent notice (its position, its defaults, its nudges) moves acceptance rates by tens of percentage points. Nouwens and colleagues scraped 10,000 consent pop-ups in 2020 and found that only about one in nine met the minimum the regulation requires. Consent here is a legally defined click, and the empirical work is about how far real interfaces are from the definition.[10][11][12]
The psychological literature on how people define, signal, and interpret agreement to sexual activity. Beres found in 2007 that most studies used the term without defining it and that the definitions in use pointed at different things. Muehlenhard, Humphreys, Jozkowski, and Peterson's 2016 review organised those into three: consent as an internal state of willingness, consent as an explicit act of agreeing, and consent as behaviour that others interpret as willingness. The three come apart in practice, since the state can exist without the act and the act can be read from behaviour that did not mean it. Consent here is a research variable operationalised by self-report and vignette, and the field's central finding is that the parties often do not share a definition.[13][14]
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