The influence of false and missing alarms of safety system on drivers' risk-taking behavior

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of false and missing alarms of safety system on drivers' risk-taking behavior by laboratory experiments. The task is to move a vehicle from below to top through an intersection displayed on a PC monitor without colliding with crossing traffic. Participants performed the task under different experimental conditions with different types of system failure: (1) no failure, (2) false alarm, (3) missing alarm, and (4) no information. We conducted two experiments. The difference between Experiment 1 (E1) and Experiment 2 (E2) is the frequency of false or missing alarms: erroneous alarms occurred twice as many in E2 as E1. The differences of the result between E1 and E2 indicate that the different frequencies of missing alarm have a different effect on risk-taking behavior. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.