The autonomous vehicle dilemma: passenger(s) versus pedestrian(s)

The deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on the roads opens moral and ethical issues related to their ‘behaviour’ in daily traffic situations. A debated question is how individuals perceive the choices taken by AVs in life-threatening scenarios, and whether the same or different moral standards are applied to humans’ and AVs’ decisions. In an online experiment, a questionnaire was submitted to an international sample (N = 353). The aim was to test whether the actions made by an AV or a human driver in realistic road-accident scenarios were judged according to a different perspective. We manipulated the decision maker, the decision, the number of pedestrians crossing the road and the number of occupants inside the vehicle, to assess the importance of utilitarian principles and the role of self-sacrifice in moral evaluations.The results highlight a preference for humans’ decisions over AVs’ ones and suggest a difference in the importance of utilitarian principles in the assessment of humans and AVs. The human self-sacrifice attitude is appreciated to a different degree, according to the type of individuals saved (pedestrians or occupants). Further investigations are needed to disentangle a human-bias from the effect of self-sacrifice on the moral evaluations of humans’ and AVs’ actions.