Animal Consent, Choice, and Control
The Influence of Design on Animal Behavior
About the Project
This work consists of a series of projects that focus on the ways in which design choices constrain the behavior of animals in a variety of ways and environments.
Our first project on this subject was accepted for publication in April 2024! Here, we focused on the ways that researchers evaluated animals’ consent to participate in their projects, a central concern of the Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) community. While reporting was uneven, most researchers relied on humans to provide what Mancini calls “mediated” consent on behalf of animal participants (especially dogs and farm animals). Other researchers relied on research designs by which the animals, themselves, could signal their willingness to participate or not, demonstrating “contingent” consent (especially zoo/non-domestic animals). The reporting and research design models of this second group of authors offers a model for ACI researchers’ consideration.
Building on our work on consent, our current project (2024-2025) focuses on the concepts of choice and control, and ACI researchers’ desire to use technology to better support animals’ quality of life. Relying both on a systematic literature review and interviews with zoo practitioners, we position the importance of providing choice and control within what Jon Coe argues is the importance of allowing captive animals to develop “species competence”.
This project is a collaboration with Cristina Bosco, Lisa Brey, Eli McGraw, Isha Mahajan, Dane Smith and Lilli Hassinger.
Publications
"Dogs or Not Dogs? Examining ACI Authors' Reporting on Animal Participants' Willingness to Engage in Research: A Spotlight on Mediated and Contingent Consent", Eli McGraw, Cristina Bosco, Lisa Brey, Christena Nippert-Eng; Publication/Conference Name: ACI2024 Conference Proceedings (ID: 6) April 2024
Acknowledgements
We sincerely thank our participants for their time and feedback, which made this research possible. We would also like to thank the Department of Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington for its support.