For ethical reasons, psychological participants must be given a consent form that details what the experiment is about and what will be required of them. Unfortunately, these participant information sheets often turn into a page or two of turgid prose that winds up with the feel and finish of the end user license agreements you see during software installation. Like a EULA or the contract you sign for a flat, these documents are not actually designed to be read, digested, and understood. The point rather, is to make the researcher feel like they are being responsible and informative and to get the participant to “click agree” at the bottom as quickly as possible.

A nice counter example are the instructions given to participants during a set of experiments about self-other knowledge of personality characteristics (more on these findings in time):

These 10 minutes are completely unstructured, it’s up to you guys how you want to get to know each other. Try to give everyone a chance to talk and try to get to know everyone, but other than that, just do whatever you would normally do when trying to get to know a group of new people.

Participants are humans, not lawyers.

• Vazire. 2010. Who Knows What About a Person? The Self–Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA) Model. J Pers Soc Psychol 98: 281-300 doi:10.1037/a0017908

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