Planning and Policy for Safer Roads with Autonomous Vehicles: Moral Decision Making Behavior in Dilemma-inducing Situations

The unparalleled technological advances in vehicle automation and artificial intelligence have made autonomous vehicle (AV) technically available for extensive road tests and, even recently, for limited commercial mobility services. Notwithstanding these advances, a critical challenge to integration of AV into the real-world transportation systems as well as our personal and professional lives is establishing ethical regulations for AV. In particular, such ethical principles would determine how an AV makes moral decisions in dilemma-inducing situations, for instance, whether it should hit a teenager pedestrian to spare two senior passengers onboard. This research project looks at this problem not from the philosophical perspective, which prescribes moral behavior of an AV. Instead, this project describes the public expectation and perception of a moral AV, which is the perspective of econom(etr)ics, psychology, and cognitive science disciplines. To do so, the studies in economics and psychology explore the process of human decision making focusing on the morality dimension of decisions, since many of decisions humans routinely make can have a moral aspect. A recent example is the decision of receiving vaccination at a cost (e.g., side effects for the receiver) to immune the community and the society. This research project aims at understanding the public expectations of moral AVs by unravelling the cognitive process of human decisions making considering the decisions’ morality aspect. This objective will be accomplished in two consecutive tasks explained below. Task 1: Designing and Conducting a Survey Using Stated Preferences (SP) Experiment. For the purpose of analyzing consumers’ choice behavior (e.g., travel behavior), the SP experimental design method provides a rigorous and efficient tool, which is extensively applied in the relevant literature. Applying this tool, this task designs a survey to collect an empirical dataset on human subjects. The PI plans to accomplish the required IRB certificate for data collection. Task 2: Developing a Modeling Framework on Humans’ Decision Making. This task focuses on developing methods built on econom(etr)ics, psychology, and cognitive science disciplines, to be capable of capturing morality dimension of decisions. One of such methods is choice theory-based model of latent class choice, which is capable of capturing “reason-based” morality. Another example is random regret model, which can capture “emotion-based” morality (since regret is an emotion). The models are then empirically estimated on the dataset collected in Task 1.

Language

  • English

Project

  • Status: Active
  • Funding: $110633
  • Contract Numbers:

    69A3552344811

  • Sponsor Organizations:

    Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

    University Transportation Centers Program
    Department of Transportation
    Washington, DC  United States  20590
  • Managing Organizations:

    Carnegie Mellon University

    Pittsburgh, PA  United States 

    Safety21 University Transportation Center

    Carnegie Mellon University
    Pittsburgh, PA  United States  15213
  • Project Managers:

    Stearns, Amy

  • Performing Organizations:

    University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

    1201 W. University Dr
    Edinburg, TX  United States  78539
  • Principal Investigators:

    Nazari, Fatemeh

  • Start Date: 20240701
  • Expected Completion Date: 20250630
  • Actual Completion Date: 0
  • USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01933410
  • Record Type: Research project
  • Source Agency: Safety21 University Transportation Center
  • Contract Numbers: 69A3552344811
  • Files: UTC, RIP
  • Created Date: Oct 13 2024 10:57AM