Improving Informed Consent to Research

Chuck Lidz, PhD

Clinical research participants are often described as having a therapeutic misconception when they lack adequate appreciation of one or more essential differences between clinical research and usual medical care. Therapeutic misconception creates a tension between the need to protect the rights of individual participants and the importance of promoting research that advances the public good.

Despite a large body of research documenting therapeutic misconception among participants in a wide range of clinical research settings, little attention has been paid to studying ways to reduce it.