Exploring moral algorithm preferences in autonomous vehicle dilemmas: an empirical study
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PROVIDER: S-EPMC10713701 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jan
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:As autonomous machines, such as automated vehicles (AVs) and robots, become pervasive in society, they will inevitably face moral dilemmas where they must make decisions that risk injuring humans. However, prior research has framed these dilemmas in starkly simple terms, i.e., framing decisions as life and death and neglecting the influence of risk of injury to the involved parties on the outcome. Here, we focus on this gap and present experimental work that systematically studies the effect of risk of injury on the decisions people make in these dilemmas. In four experiments, participants were asked to program their AVs to either save five pedestrians, which we refer to as the utilitarian choice, or save the driver, which we refer to as the nonutilitarian choice. The results indicate that most participants made the utilitarian choice but that this choice was moderated in important ways by perceived risk to the driver and risk to the pedestrians. As a second contribution, we demonstrate the value of formulating AV moral dilemmas in a game-theoretic framework that considers the possible influence of others' behavior. In the fourth experiment, we show that participants were more (less) likely to make the utilitarian choice, the more utilitarian (nonutilitarian) other drivers behaved; furthermore, unlike the game-theoretic prediction that decision-makers inevitably converge to nonutilitarianism, we found significant evidence of utilitarianism. We discuss theoretical implications for our understanding of human decision-making in moral dilemmas and practical guidelines for the design of autonomous machines that solve these dilemmas while, at the same time, being likely to be adopted in practice.
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Project description:The development of artificial intelligence has led researchers to study the ethical principles that should guide machine behavior. The challenge in building machine morality based on people's moral decisions, however, is accounting for the biases in human moral decision-making. In seven studies, this paper investigates how people's personal perspectives and decision-making modes affect their decisions in the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. Moreover, it determines the variations in people's moral decisions that can be attributed to the situational factors of the dilemmas. The reported studies demonstrate that people's moral decisions, regardless of the presented dilemma, are biased by their decision-making mode and personal perspective. Under intuitive moral decisions, participants shift more towards a deontological doctrine by sacrificing the passenger instead of the pedestrian. In addition, once the personal perspective is made salient participants preserve the lives of that perspective, i.e. the passenger shifts towards sacrificing the pedestrian, and vice versa. These biases in people's moral decisions underline the social challenge in the design of a universal moral code for autonomous vehicles. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide directions for future research.
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Project description:New energy sources are transforming the automotive market. This shift has also expanded the possibilities for in-vehicle interaction. Through a literature review, this study categorizes the in-vehicle interaction activities into three types: driving tasks, comfort tasks, and entertainment tasks. This study conducted empirical survey of 377 users to understand their preferences of in-vehicle interaction input methods inside new energy vehicles. The results show that gender, educational level, income, driver's license type and driving experience have significant influence on the perception and preference of the in-vehicle interaction input methods. However, age and experience with new energy vehicle didn't show significant results. The findings of this study can assist manufacturers in developing targeted solutions and meeting the personalized needs of users in future vehicle market segments.
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Project description:Introduction Autonomous vehicles can have social attributes and make ethical decisions during driving. In this study, we investigated the impact of human-vehicle moral matching on trust in autonomous vehicles and its mechanism. Methods A 2*2 experiment involving 200 participants was conducted. Results The results of the data analysis show that utilitarian moral individuals have greater trust than deontological moral individuals. Perceived value and perceived risk play a double-edged role in people’s trust in autonomous vehicles. People’s moral type has a positive impact on trust through perceived value and a negative impact through perceived risk. Vehicle moral type moderates the impact of human moral type on trust through perceived value and perceived risk. Discussion The conclusion shows that heterogeneous moral matching (people are utilitarian, vehicles are deontology) has a more positive effect on trust than homogenous moral matching (both people and vehicles are deontology or utilitarian), which is consistent with the assumption of selfish preferences of individuals. The results of this study provide theoretical expansion for the fields related to human-vehicle interaction and AI social attributes and provide exploratory suggestions for the functional design of autonomous vehicles.
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Project description:While extensive research has been conducted on adults' judgments in moral sacrificial dilemmas, there is little research on adolescents. The present study aimed at: (1) adding further empirical evidence about adolescents' moral decisions (deontological vs. utilitarian) in sacrificial moral dilemmas and (2) investigating how these moral decisions relate with gender, school grade, emotional traits (callous-unemotional traits), context-related experiences (perceived parental rejection and community violence exposure), and moral-related factors (moral disengagement and universalism value). A sample of 755 Italian adolescents (54.7% females; Mean age=16.45, SD=1.61) attending the second and the fifth year of secondary school took part in the study. Two sacrificial trolley-type dilemmas (where harmful actions promote the greater good) were presented. In the "switch" scenario (impersonal sacrificial dilemma), the choice is whether to hit a switch to save five people killing only one person. In the "footbridge" scenario (personal sacrificial dilemma), the choice is whether to push a large man off a footbridge saving five persons. For each scenario, participants had to indicate whether the proposed action was "morally acceptable" or not. Data were analyzed performing generalized linear mixed models. Our results showed that: (1) Adolescents were more likely to indicate as admissible to hit the switch rather than to push the large man; (2) male adolescents, compared to females, were more likely to say it was morally acceptable to intervene in the footbridge dilemma, whereas younger adolescents said it was morally acceptable both in the switch and the footbridge situations; and (3) higher levels of callous-unemotional traits, perceived parental rejection, and moral disengagement, on the one hand, and lower levels of universalism, on the other hand, were associated to higher admissibility to intervene in the footbridge scenario. Higher community violence exposure was associated with a lower propensity to intervene in the switch scenario. Overall, the present study expands the research on sacrificial dilemmas involving a sample of adolescents. The findings support previous studies concerning the role of emotions in making moral decisions but, at the same, open new perspectives regarding the role of contextual experiences and moral-related factors.
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Project description:The Foreign-Language effect (FLe) on morality describes how late bilinguals make different decisions on moral judgements, when presented in either their native or foreign language. However the relevance of this phenomenon to early bilinguals, where a language's "nativeness" is less distinct, is unknown. This study aims to verify the effect of early bilinguals' languages on their moral decisions and examine how language experience may influence these decisions. Eighty-six early English-Chinese bilinguals were asked to perform a moral dilemmas task consisting of personal and impersonal dilemmas, in either English or Mandarin Chinese. Information on language experience factors were also collected from the participants. Findings suggest that early bilinguals do show evidence of a language effect on their moral decisions, which is dependent on how dominant they are in the language. Particularly, the more dominant participants were in their tested language, the larger the difference between their personal and impersonal dilemma response choice. In light of these findings, the study discusses the need to re-examine how we conceptualize the FLe phenomenon and its implications on bilinguals' moral judgement. It also addresses the importance of treating bilingualism as multidimensional, rather than a unitary variable.
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Project description:Advances in Virtual Reality (VR) technologies allow the investigation of simulated moral actions in visually immersive environments. Using a robotic manipulandum and an interactive sculpture, we now also incorporate realistic haptic feedback into virtual moral simulations. In two experiments, we found that participants responded with greater utilitarian actions in virtual and haptic environments when compared to traditional questionnaire assessments of moral judgments. In experiment one, when incorporating a robotic manipulandum, we found that the physical power of simulated utilitarian responses (calculated as the product of force and speed) was predicted by individual levels of psychopathy. In experiment two, which integrated an interactive and life-like sculpture of a human into a VR simulation, greater utilitarian actions continued to be observed. Together, these results support a disparity between simulated moral action and moral judgment. Overall this research combines state-of-the-art virtual reality, robotic movement simulations, and realistic human sculptures, to enhance moral paradigms that are often contextually impoverished. As such, this combination provides a better assessment of simulated moral action, and illustrates the embodied nature of morally-relevant actions.
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Project description:People make flexible decisions across a wide range of contexts to resolve social or moral conflicts. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) frequently report difficulties in such behaviors, which hinders the flexibility in changing strategies during daily activities or adjustment of perspective during communication. However, the underlying mechanisms of this issue are insufficiently understood. This study aimed to investigate decision flexibility in ASD using a functional magnetic resonance imaging task that involved recognizing and resolving two types of moral dilemmas: cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and mitigating inevitable misconducts (MIM). The CBA session assessed the participants' pitting of result-oriented outcomes against distressful harmful actions, whereas the MIM session assessed their pitting of the extenuation of a criminal sentence against a sympathetic situation of defendants suffering from violence or disease. The behavioral outcome in CBA-related flexibility was significantly lower in the ASD group compared to that of the typical development group. In the corresponding CBA contrast, activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus was lower in the ASD group. Meanwhile, in the MIM-related flexibility, there were no significant group differences in behavioral outcome or brain activity. Our findings add to our understanding of flexible decision-making in ASD.
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Project description:"Sacrificial dilemmas" are the scenarios typically used to study moral judgment and human morality. However, these dilemmas have been criticized regarding their lack of ecological validity. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a relevant context to further examine individuals' moral judgment and choice of action with more realistic sacrificial dilemmas. Using this context, the purpose of the present study is to investigate how moral responses are influenced by the contextualization of the dilemma (i.e., contextualized or not within the Covid-19 pandemic). By comparing two versions of one dilemma, Experiment 1 revealed that the more realistic version (the one contextualized within the Covid-19 pandemic) did not elicit more utilitarian responses than the less realistic version (the one not contextualized within the Covid-19 pandemic). In Experiment 2, we examined more specifically whether both the perceived realism of the dilemma and the plausibility of a utilitarian action influence moral responses. Results confirmed that the contextualization of the dilemma does not make any difference in moral responses. However, the plausibility of an action appears to exert an influence on the choice of action. Indeed, participants were more inclined to choose the utilitarian action in the plausible action versions than in the implausible action versions of the dilemma. Overall, these results shed light on the importance for future research of using mundane and dramatic realistic dilemmas displaying full information regarding a sacrificial action and its consequences.
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Project description:Centuries' worth of cultural stories suggest that self-sacrifice may be a cornerstone of our moral concepts, yet this notion is largely absent from recent theories in moral psychology. For instance, in the footbridge version of the well-known trolley car problem the only way to save five people from a runaway trolley is to push a single man on the tracks. It is explicitly specified that the bystander cannot sacrifice himself because his weight is insufficient to stop the trolley. But imagine if this were not the case. Would people rather sacrifice themselves than push another? In Study 1, we find that people approve of self-sacrifice more than directly harming another person to achieve the same outcome. In Studies 2 and 3, we demonstrate that the effect is not broadly about sensitivity to self-cost, instead there is something unique about sacrificing the self. Important theoretical implications about agent-relativity and the role of causality in moral judgments are discussed.
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