50 Shades of Black and White: An Examination of how University Students Perceive Sexual Encounters when Consent is Depicted as Ambiguous
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Educational campaigns about sexual consent stress it should be a clearly established, direct, enthusiastic process. However, consent is often communicated nonverbally and indirectly. Consequently, individuals are likely faced with ambiguity about the consensual status of an encounter. Prior experience and contextual or social cues are sources of information we recruit to resolve ambiguity. This study investigated how university students perceive a heterosexual encounter where consent is not unequivocal. We examined whether contextual and gender role typicality influenced both intuitive and legal perceptions of consent. Participants read a short story describing a male-female sexual interaction. Context (Harlequin romance, BDSM romance, and campus Netflix ‘n Chill) and gender of the more sexually-assertive partner were manipulated between subjects. Participants responded to a number of open- and close-ended questions assessing how consensual the encounter was, how consent was communicated, whether the exchange met the legal definition of consent, and how the characters in the story were perceived. All encounters were rated as strongly consensual (> 5.5 out of 7), regardless of context or gender role typicality. Subjects’ sex at birth was related to perceived consent, with males rating encounters as significantly more consensual. Many subjects perceived the consent to be directly and verbally communicated. Yet, many also endorsed the position that one or both parties could later declare it was not consensual. Inconsistencies or overestimations in judgements of consent may result from judgments based on cognitive ability of similar encounters, or from established norms where absence of a verbal no considered sufficient. Discipline: Psychology (Honours) Faculty Mentor: Dr. Aimee Skye
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".