The Behavioural Research Centre, Huddersfield Business School, The University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom; Department of People and Organisations, Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, United Kingdom.
The Behavioural Research Centre, Huddersfield Business School, The University of Huddersfield, United Kingdom.
Cognition. 2021 Jul;212:104666. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104666. Epub 2021 Apr 27.
In preparation for unavoidable collisions, autonomous vehicle (AV) manufacturers could program their cars with utilitarian ethical algorithms that maximize the number of lives saved during a crash. However, recent research employing hypothetical AV crash scenarios reveals that people are not willing to purchase a utilitarian AV despite judging them to be morally appropriate (Bonnefon, Shariff, & Rahwan, 2016). This important result, indicating evidence for a social dilemma, has not yet been psychologically explored by behavioral scientists. In order to address the psychological underpinnings of this phenomenon, we developed and tested a novel theoretical proposal - perspective-taking accessibility (PT accessibility). Accordingly, we established that providing participants with access to both situational perspectives (AV buyers can be passengers or pedestrians) in crash scenarios, eliminated the behavioral inconsistency between their utilitarian judgments of moral appropriateness and non-utilitarian purchasing behavior. Moreover, our full PT accessibility induced respondents' utilitarian prosocial judgments and purchasing behavior (Experiments 1a and 1b) and consistent utilitarian preferences across judgment tasks (Experiment 2). Crucially, with full PT accessibility, participants' utilitarian purchasing behavior as well as their willingness to buy and ride utilitarian AVs were informed by their utilitarian moral judgments. Full PT accessibility provides the participants with even odds of being a pedestrian or passenger in crash scenarios, and thus impartiality. It could be argued that full PT accessibility is a new type of 'veil of ignorance', which is not based on purposely induced self-interest and uneven risk options (as in Huang, Greene, & Bazerman, 2019), but rather is based on even odds of being a passenger or pedestrian, and therefore with even 50/50 chance to die/live as passenger or pedestrian. Under these circumstances one can measure utilitarian preferences.
为了应对不可避免的碰撞，自动驾驶汽车（AV）制造商可以为其汽车编程，使用功利主义的伦理算法，在碰撞中最大限度地提高拯救的生命数量。然而，最近的研究采用假设的 AV 碰撞场景表明，尽管人们认为它们在道德上是合理的，但并不愿意购买功利主义的 AV（Bonnefon、Shariff 和 Rahwan，2016）。这一重要结果表明存在社会困境的证据，但尚未被行为科学家从心理学角度进行探索。为了解决这一现象的心理学基础，我们提出了一个新的理论假设——观点可得性（PT 可得性）。相应地，我们发现，在碰撞场景中为参与者提供情景观点（AV 买家可以是乘客或行人）的可及性，可以消除他们在道德适当性的功利判断和非功利购买行为之间的行为不一致性。此外，我们的全 PT 可得性诱导了受访者的功利亲社会判断和购买行为（实验 1a 和 1b），以及判断任务中的一致功利偏好（实验 2）。至关重要的是，通过全 PT 可得性，参与者的功利购买行为以及他们购买和乘坐功利 AV 的意愿，都受到他们功利道德判断的影响。全 PT 可得性为参与者提供了在碰撞场景中成为行人或乘客的均等机会，从而实现了公正。可以认为，全 PT 可得性是一种新型的“无知之幕”，它不是基于故意诱导的自身利益和不平等的风险选择（如 Huang、Greene 和 Bazerman，2019），而是基于成为乘客或行人的均等机会，因此作为乘客或行人有 50/50 的机会死亡/生存。在这种情况下，可以衡量功利偏好。
