Does the affirmative consent standard increase the accuracy of sexual assault perceptions? It depends on how you...

Colleges and universities are increasingly adopting affirmative consent standards of sexual assault, in which consent is defined as conscious and voluntary "yeses" given throughout a sexual interaction. We examined the impact of affirmative consent standards on perceptions of assault and consent.

We hypothesized that in sexual assault scenarios involving physical force or verbal coercion, exposure to the consent standard would increase perceptions of assault and decrease perceptions of consent relative to not being exposed to the standard. We then explored whether dehumanization of the perpetrator or the victim mediates the association between assault type and sexual assault perceptions and how this relation changes on the basis of exposure to the affirmative consent standard.

We exposed 909 participants (predominantly women: n = 574; predominantly White: n = 677; age: M = 28.61 years, SD = 11.10; students: n = 363, Mechanical Turk workers: n = 546) to an affirmative consent standard in a written policy, a video using a "cup-of-tea" metaphor to describe the consent standard, or no information on the standard. Participants rated perceptions of assault, consent, and dehumanization of a man and woman involved in a sexual interaction involving physical force, verbal coercion, or a consensual agreement.

Participants who saw the affirmative consent video were more likely to perceive physical assault as assault compared with participants in the no-exposure control condition. Participants who read the affirmative consent definition were no more or less likely to perceive physical assault as sexual assault compared with participants in the control condition. Participants exposed to the text definition perceived the consensual interaction as more assaultive than did participants in the video and control conditions. Perpetrator dehumanization also emerged as a mediator of the relation between assault type and assault perceptions.

These results suggest that exposure to consent standards sometimes aids sexual assault decision-making but also leads to confusion, even in scenarios in which consent is normally discernable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).