A survey to measure cognitive biases influencing mobility choices

TL;DR

This paper presents a survey analyzing how cognitive biases like halo bias, choice-supportive bias, and reactance influence people's preferences for different mobility modes, providing data and models for sustainable urban planning simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive survey on mobility preferences, identifies key cognitive biases affecting decisions, and proposes a simulation framework for urban mobility planning.

Findings

Cognitive biases significantly influence mobility choices.

Data shows a preference for individual cars despite policies favoring soft mobility.

A model for simulating mobility decisions based on biases is developed.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a survey about the perceptions of 4 mobility modes (car, bus, bicycle, walking) and the preferences of users for 6 modal choice factors. This survey has gathered 650 answers in 2023, that are published as open data. In this study, we analyse these results to highlight the influence of 3 cognitive biases on mobility decisions: halo bias, choice-supportive bias, and reactance. These cognitive biases are proposed as plausible explanations of the observed behaviour, where the population tends to stick to individual cars despite urban policies aiming at favouring soft mobility. This model can serve as the basis for a simulator of mobility decisions in a virtual town, and the gathered data can be used to initialise this population with realistic attributes. Work is ongoing to design a simulation-based serious game where the player takes the role of an urban manager faced with planning choices to make their city more sustainable.