The global consensus on the risk management of autonomous driving

TL;DR

This study reveals a surprising global consensus on how risks should be distributed among road users in autonomous driving, emphasizing risk severity over accident probability, across diverse cultures.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale cross-cultural experimental evidence on risk distribution preferences in autonomous vehicle traffic scenarios.

Findings

Risk preferences are similar across cultures.

People prioritize accident severity over probability.

No country favors higher risk for vulnerable road users.

Abstract

Every maneuver of a vehicle redistributes risks between road users. While human drivers do this intuitively, autonomous vehicles allow and require deliberative algorithmic risk management. But how should traffic risks be distributed among road users? In a global experimental study in eight countries with different cultural backgrounds and almost 11,000 participants, we compared risk distribution preferences. It turns out that risk preferences in road traffic are strikingly similar between the cultural zones. The vast majority of participants in all countries deviates from a guiding principle of minimizing accident probabilities in favor of weighing up the probability and severity of accidents. At the national level, the consideration of accident probability and severity hardly differs between countries. The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles detected in deterministic crash scenarios disappears in risk assessments of everyday traffic situations in all countries. In no country do cyclists receive a risk bonus that goes beyond their higher vulnerability. In sum, our results suggest that a global consensus on the risk ethics of autonomous driving is easier to establish than on the ethics of crashing.