Though consent forms include important information, those experienced with behavioral research often observe that participants do not carefully read consent forms. Three studies examined participants' reading of consent forms for in-person experiments. In each study, we inserted the phrase "some researchers wear yellow pants" into sections of the consent form and measured participants' reading of the form by testing their recall of the color yellow. In Study 1, we found that the majority of participants did not read consent forms thoroughly. This suggests that overall, participants sign consent forms that they have not read, confirming what has been observed anecdotally and documented in other research domains. Study 2 examined which sections of consent forms participants read and found that participants were more likely to read the first 2 sections of a consent form (procedure and risks) than later sections (benefits and anonymity and confidentiality). Given that rates of recall of the target phrase were under 70% even when the sentence was inserted into earlier sections of the form, we explored ways to improve participant reading in Study 3. Theorizing that the presence of a researcher may influence participants' retention of the form, we assigned participants to read the form with or without a researcher present. Results indicated that removing the researcher from the room while participants read the consent form decreased recall of the target phrase. Implications of these results and suggestions for future researchers are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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一些研究人员穿着黄色裤子，但阅读同意书的参与者更少：探索和改进人类受试者研究中的同意书阅读。

虽然同意书包含重要信息，但那些有行为研究经验的人经常观察到参与者没有仔细阅读同意书。三项研究检查了参与者对面对面实验的同意书的阅读情况。在每项研究中，我们将“一些研究人员穿黄色裤子”这句话插入到同意书的部分中，并通过测试参与者对黄色的回忆来衡量参与者对表格的阅读。在研究 1 中，我们发现大多数参与者没有彻底阅读同意书。这表明总体而言，参与者签署了他们未阅读的同意书，确认了在其他研究领域中观察到的轶事和记录的内容。研究 2 检查了参与者阅读同意书的哪些部分，发现参与者更可能阅读同意书的前两部分（程序和风险），而不是后面的部分（好处和匿名性和保密性）。鉴于即使将句子插入表格的较早部分，目标短语的回忆率也低于 70%，我们在研究 3 中探索了改善参与者阅读的方法。表格，我们指派参与者在有或没有研究人员在场的情况下阅读表格。结果表明，在参与者阅读同意书时将研究人员从房间中移除会减少对目标短语的回忆。讨论了这些结果的影响和对未来研究人员的建议。