IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2019 May;25(5):1898-1907. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2019.2899227. Epub 2019 Feb 25.
Emergency situations during car driving sometimes force the driver to make a sudden decision. Predicting these decisions will have important applications in updating risk analyses in insurance applications, but also can give insights for drafting autonomous vehicle guidelines. Studying such behavior in experimental settings, however, is limited by ethical issues as it would endanger peoples' lives. Here, we employed the potential of virtual reality (VR) to investigate decision-making in an extreme situation in which participants would have to sacrifice others in order to save themselves. In a VR driving simulation, participants first trained to complete a difficult course with multiple crossroads in which the wrong turn would lead the car to fall down a cliff. In the testing phase, obstacles suddenly appeared on the "safe" turn of a crossroad: for the control group, obstacles consisted of trees, whereas for the experimental group, they were pedestrians. In both groups, drivers had to decide between falling down the cliff or colliding with the obstacles. Results showed that differences in personality traits were able to predict this decision: in the experimental group, drivers who collided with the pedestrians had significantly higher psychopathy and impulsivity traits, whereas impulsivity alone was to some degree predictive in the control group. Other factors like heart rate differences, gender, video game expertise, and driving experience were not predictive of the emergency decision in either group. Our results show that self-interest related personality traits affect decision-making when choosing between preservation of self or others in extreme situations and showcase the potential of virtual reality in studying and modeling human decision-making.
驾驶过程中的紧急情况有时会迫使驾驶员做出突然的决定。预测这些决策将在更新保险应用中的风险分析方面具有重要应用，同时也可以为起草自动驾驶车辆指南提供深入的见解。然而，在实验环境中研究这种行为受到伦理问题的限制，因为这会危及人们的生命。在这里，我们利用虚拟现实（VR）的潜力来研究在一种极端情况下的决策，即在这种情况下，参与者必须牺牲他人才能拯救自己。在 VR 驾驶模拟中，参与者首先接受训练，以完成一个具有多个十字路口的困难课程，其中错误的转弯会导致汽车坠落悬崖。在测试阶段，十字路口的“安全”转弯处突然出现障碍物：对于对照组，障碍物由树木组成，而对于实验组，障碍物是行人。在两组中，驾驶员都必须在坠落悬崖或与障碍物碰撞之间做出选择。结果表明，个性特征的差异能够预测这一决策：在实验组中，与行人碰撞的驾驶员具有明显更高的精神病态和冲动特质，而在对照组中，冲动特质在一定程度上具有预测性。其他因素，如心率差异、性别、电子游戏专业知识和驾驶经验，在两组中都不能预测紧急决策。我们的研究结果表明，在极端情况下选择自我保护或他人保护时，与自我利益相关的个性特征会影响决策，并展示了虚拟现实在研究和模拟人类决策方面的潜力。
