Abstract

In “Mindsets, Informed Consent and Research,” Lynn Jansen opens a promising new window onto consent for early‐phase cancer trials. She hypothesizes that patients who have agreed to take part in these trials, most of whom have incurable cancers, adopt different cognitive orientations or mindsets during the predecisional “deliberative” phase than they do during the postdecisional “implementation” phase. The different objectives that individuals hold during these phases—choosing among courses of action during the former, implementing the chosen action during the latter—lead to the adaptive and preconscious application of different cognitive and attentional filters. If this is the case, then the prevalent practice of using surveys and interviews with postdecisional research participants, who on average markedly overestimate the potential for benefit that these trials offer, to extrapolate to the ethically central but much less studied deliberative phase, is methodologically suspect. As Jansen correctly notes, her thesis has numerous implications for the theory and study of informed consent. Three, in particular, deserve further discussion.