Investigation of the instinctive reaction of human drivers in social dilemma based on the use of a driving simulator and a questionnaire survey

Abstract

Objective：The moral and ethical issue is a great challenge to the development of autonomous vehicles. There may be distinctions between the choices made by an observer and a participant. The paper is designed to investigate whether drivers will sacrifice the fewest people to save more people in social dilemma, and whether human drivers would give priority to protecting pedestrians or self-protection in an emergency.

Methodology: The experiment was conducted with a total of 50 participants assigned to three groups. Three experimental scenarios were designed and each of them contained a social dilemma. A driving simulator was used in this study to explore the choices of human drivers in social dilemma. In addition, the simulator results were compared with those of questionnaire survey.

Result: In study 1, 73% of 22 participants swerved into the right lane to hit only one pedestrian for the safety of other five. In study 2 and 3, more participants chose to hit the barrier to protect the pedestrian.

Conclusion: A conclusion can be drawn from the second and third group of experiments that most drivers consider not only their own safety, but the safety of pedestrians. Most of the participants intended to minimize the total amount of harm in social dilemma. The choice of crashing into barriers to protect a pedestrian can also be seen as a way to minimize the total amount of harm.

Keywords:

• Driver behavior
• traffic psychology
• autonomous vehicles
• driving simulator
• instinctive reaction

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge Sumin Zhang, Ziwen Yu, Xiaofeng Huang, Shuai Zhang and Yuhuan Sheng for technical assistance, Yichi Zhang, Naixuan Zhu for assistance with simulator experiments. Funding: Supported by National Science Foundation of China (grants 51775236 51675224 U1564214) and National Key Research and Development Program (grant 2017YFB0102600). Competing interests: Authors declare no competing interests. Data and materials availability: All data is available in the main text or the supplementary materials.