Conference proceeding
Who Should We Choose to Sacrifice, Self or Pedestrian? Evaluating Moral Decision-Making in Virtual Reality
ENGINEERING PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS, EPCE 2023, PT II, Vol.14018, pp.560-572
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
01/01/2023
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-35389-5_39
Abstract
Ethical issues surrounding autonomous vehicles (AVs) have emerged as a classic topic in academic circles. When an AV faces a situation with inevitable casualties, how can the machine make the most ethical decision about who to sacrifice? Does the AV protect its passengers in the AV, or save pedestrians on the roadway? To provide reference for designing moral algorithms that govern AVs, the present study considers the roles of time pressure, pedestrian demographics, and driver demographics on human driver's moral decision-making. Sixty college students (50% men, mean age = 20.13 years, SD = 1.76) participated in a series of moral decisions involving self- versus other-sacrifice within a virtual reality driving scenario. A 3 (pedestrian age group: child vs middle-age vs elderly) x 2 (pedestrian gender: male vs female) x 2 (time pressure: present vs absent) x 2 (participant gender: male vs female) mixed factorial design was implemented. The results showed that: (1) individuals chose to sacrifice themselves more often than pedestrians, with self-sacrifice more common when faced with child pedestrians and female pedestrians; (2) female participants chose to sacrifice themselves more often than males; and (3) when facing time pressure, individuals chose to sacrifice themselves more than pedestrians, but there was no significant difference between self vs other-sacrifice without time pressure.We concluded that moral decisions when faced with inevitable sacrifice in a simulated traffic situation followed super altruism patterns. Female participants were more deontological in moral judgment and greater priority was given to saving female and child pedestrians in decisions. Further, individual's decision making under time pressure was more deontic. Results have implications for development of AV machine learning paradigms.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Who Should We Choose to Sacrifice, Self or Pedestrian? Evaluating Moral Decision-Making in Virtual Reality
- Creators
- Huarong Wang - Nantong UniversityDongqian Li - Nantong UniversityZhenhang Wang - Nantong UniversityJian Song - Nantong UniversityZhan Gao - Nantong UniversityDavid C. Schwebel - University of Alabama at Birmingham
- Contributors
- W C Li (Editor)D Harris (Editor)
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Publication Details
- ENGINEERING PSYCHOLOGY AND COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS, EPCE 2023, PT II, Vol.14018, pp.560-572
- Series
- Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-031-35389-5_39
- ISSN
- 2945-9133
- eISSN
- 1611-3349
- Publisher
- Springer Nature
- Number of pages
- 13
- Grant note
- 21JYB013 / Jiangsu Social Science Fund Project in China 2020SJZDA118 / Major Project of Philosophy and Social Science Research in Colleges and Universities of Jiangsu Province in China
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2023
- Academic Unit
- Research Administration
- Record Identifier
- 9984949184302771
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