Drivers Are Blamed More Than Their Automated Cars When Both Make Mistakes

Abstract

When an automated car harms someone, who is blamed by those who hearabout it? Here, we asked human participants to consider hypothetical cases inwhich a pedestrian was killed by a car operated under shared control of a primaryand a secondary driver, and to indicate how blame should be allocated. We findthat when only one driver makes an error, that driver is blamed more, regardlessof whether that driver is a machine or a human. However, when both drivers makeerrors in cases of human-machine shared-control vehicles, the blame attributedto the machine is reduced. This finding portends a public under-reaction tothe malfunctioning AI components of automated cars and therefore has a directpolicy implication: allowing the de-facto standards for shared-control vehicles tobe established in courts by the jury system could fail to properly regulate thesafety of those vehicles; instead, a top-down scheme (through federal laws) maybe called for.