Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University, Osnabrück, Germany.
PLoS One. 2019 Oct 9;14(10):e0223108. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0223108. eCollection 2019.
The question of how self-driving cars should behave in dilemma situations has recently attracted a lot of attention in science, media and society. A growing number of publications amass insight into the factors underlying the choices we make in such situations, often using forced-choice paradigms closely linked to the trolley dilemma. The methodology used to address these questions, however, varies widely between studies, ranging from fully immersive virtual reality settings to completely text-based surveys. In this paper we compare virtual reality and text-based assessments, analyzing the effect that different factors in the methodology have on decisions and emotional response of participants. We present two studies, comparing a total of six different conditions varying across three dimensions: The level of abstraction, the use of virtual reality, and time-constraints. Our results show that the moral decisions made in this context are not strongly influenced by the assessment, and the compared methods ultimately appear to measure very similar constructs. Furthermore, we add to the pool of evidence on the underlying factors of moral judgment in traffic dilemmas, both in terms of general preferences, i.e., features of the particular situation and potential victims, as well as in terms of individual differences between participants, such as their age and gender.
自动驾驶汽车在困境情况下应如何表现，这一问题近来引起了科学界、媒体和社会的广泛关注。越来越多的文献深入探讨了导致我们在类似情境下做出选择的因素，这些文献常采用与电车难题紧密相关的强制选择范式。然而，研究中用于解决这些问题的方法差异很大，从完全沉浸式虚拟现实环境到完全基于文本的调查都有。在本文中，我们比较了虚拟现实和基于文本的评估，分析了方法学中的不同因素对参与者决策和情绪反应的影响。我们呈现了两项研究，总共比较了六种不同的条件，这些条件在三个维度上有所变化：抽象程度、虚拟现实的使用以及时间限制。我们的结果表明，在这种情境下做出的道德决策并不受评估方式的强烈影响，而且所比较的方法最终似乎都测量了非常相似的结构。此外，我们还增加了关于交通困境中道德判断的潜在因素的证据，这些证据涉及到一般偏好，即特定情境的特征和潜在受害者，以及参与者之间的个体差异，例如他们的年龄和性别。
