When identity shapes the norm: How college students perceive consent and social appropriateness

How do perceptions of consent change depending on who’s involved? 

New research by University of Michigan School of Information lecturer and research investigator Hanna Hoover and UMSI professor Erin Krupka explores how race, gender and sexual orientation influence students’ perceptions of sexual behavior and consent-seeking on college campuses.

Published in the July issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, their research paper “Different Norms of Sexual Activity and Consent Seeking Among College Students: Social Identity and Statistical Discrimination” finds that college students responding to a survey about actions that are sexual in nature apply different normative standards to identical situations and actions depending on the race, gender and sexual orientation of the actor described.  

Research consistently demonstrates that sexual and gender minoritized individuals are at higher risk for sexual victimization but very little work has focused on those identities or the risk factors.  Hoover and Kurpka’s study helps to address this gap by expanding the focus and data collection efforts to many yet under-explored dimensions such as race, sexual orientation and the social identities of both the actors and the acted-upon. 

Using a method of social norm elicitation developed by Krupka and Weber in 2013, the research team surveyed students at a large U.S. university and asked them to evaluate the social appropriateness of various actions in four fictional but realistic vignettes related to sexual encounters. Each vignette presented the same story but the researchers vary the characters’ race, gender and sexual orientation. This means that any differences in how students rate the appropriateness of the same actions for the same story come from how their perceptions changed as a result of the race, gender and sexual orientation of the characters interacting in the story. 

The results of the paper indicate that across the board, actions taken by heterosexual men are rated as less socially appropriate than the same actions taken by fictional characters with differing race, gender and sexual orientation characteristics. They model this outcome using statistical discrimination, Hoover says, where individuals make assumptions about others based on perceived group-level characteristics. 

Hoover suggests that one explanation for the results is that student respondents may have internalized broader narratives of heterosexual men and campus sexual misconduct. 

Hoover and Krupka contextualized their findings by drawing from national data from the Campus climate survey on sexual assault and sexual misconduct. They also conducted open-ended follow-up questions and code student responses. Many respondents echo patterns of statistical discrimination or discuss themes of power differentials. 

For policies written against this backdrop, the researchers highlight that the results broaden our understanding of an important behavior for young adults and characterizes the role that identity-based social norms can play in generating different reactions to consent policy that is intended to support everyone. Identifying norms rooted in social identity may be particularly helpful in understanding causes of reporting disparities in rates of sexual harassment and assault. 

In the future, Hoover says it may be interesting to see if these same patterns exist in the larger U.S  population, or even globally. A behavioral and data scientist, Hoover started at UMSI as a postdoc in 2020. 

“I’m interested in applying insights from behavioral economics to real-world problems, especially in federal or institutional contexts,” she says. “My goal is to bridge research and practice and take what we learn in social science and put it to use.” 

Read “Different Norms of Sexual Activity and Consent Seeking Among College Students: Social Identity and Statistical Discrimination” in the July issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. See the abstract below: 

Preventing sexual assault on university campuses is rooted in promoting the adoption and practice of seeking consent. Using identity theory and a factorial vignette survey experiment, we test for the presence of implicit differences in appropriateness ratings based on context, gender, race and sexual orientation and, in aggregate, differences in social norms that govern college students’ sexual interactions. We provide a simple theoretical framework of statistical discrimination where the social norms for identical actions are predicted to differ because the appropriateness of actions is imperfectly observed and evaluators hold beliefs about underlying propensities of appropriate action that are rooted in identity. Our results show that context significantly alters perceptions of appropriate behavior and that heterosexual male actions are viewed as systematically less socially appropriate. We validate our findings with a post-study questionnaire which reveals that beliefs regarding appropriateness ratings are largely driven by the perceived rates of sexual assault among the represented population by the vignette narrator. The paper advances the study of norms rooted in identity and presents an identity-based theoretical framework that provides intuition for how such a difference may arise.

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Hanna Hoover is a Lecturer III in Information and a research investigator at UMSI. Learn more about her by visiting her UMSI faculty profile. 

Erin Krupka is the associate dean for faculty and a professor at UMSI. Check out more of her research by visiting her UMSI faculty profile.