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Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles

Nature volume 579, pages E1–E2 (2020)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 04 March 2020

The Original Article was published on 24 October 2018

Arising from: E. Awad et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6 (2018)

How should self-driving cars make decisions when human lives hang in the balance? The Moral Machine experiment1 (MME) suggests that people want autonomous vehicles (AVs) to treat different human lives unequally, preferentially killing some people (for example, men, the old and the poor) over others (for example, women, the young and the rich). Our results challenge this idea, revealing that this apparent preference for inequality is driven by the specific ‘trolley-type’ paradigm used by the MME. Multiple studies with a revised paradigm reveal that people overwhelmingly want autonomous vehicles to treat different human lives equally in life and death situations, ignoring gender, age and status—a preference consistent with a general desire for equality2,3,4.

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Fig. 1: People’s choices for how autonomous vehicles should be programmed to act in situations where human lives are at stake (study 1).

Data availability

All materials, data and code used in the studies are available at https://osf.io/wy8tq/?view_only=e5907f552f5e4a8a901cbdd2d4c035f6.

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Acknowledgements

Y.E.B. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation (SMA-1714298). K.G. acknowledges support from the Charles Koch Foundation and from the National Science Foundation (BCS-1823944).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Yochanan E. Bigman & Kurt Gray

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  1. Yochanan E. Bigman
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  2. Kurt Gray
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Contributions

Y.E.B. and K.G. planned the research, designed the experiment, collected the data, analysed the data and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Yochanan E. Bigman.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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This file contains Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Tables 1-2 and Supplementary Figure 1.

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Bigman, Y.E., Gray, K. Life and death decisions of autonomous vehicles. Nature 579, E1–E2 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-1987-4

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