Can simple anthropomorphism change people’s perception of self-driving vehicle accidents?

Abstract

Although self-driving vehicles (SDVs) promise to reduce traffic crashes largely, they cannot eliminate all crashes and they might create new crashes. Efforts to understand how the public responds traffic accidents caused by SDVs or involved with SDVs are very limited. Our research aims to understand whether simple anthropomorphic features (giving a SDV a human name and a male photo) change participants’ perceived severity of a traffic accident involving with a SDV or caused by the SDV and whether certain post affective responses (affect evoked by the accident information, negative affect by SDV, trust in SDV) account for the change in perceived severity. In a 2 (SDV: normal vs. anthropomorphic) * 2 (accident cause: self-caused vs. other-caused) between-subject design (N = 260), we found that the simple anthropomorphic design and the type of accident cause did not affect perceived severity and these three affective responses.