With the imminent advent of autonomous vehicles (AVs) comes a moral dilemma: How do people assign responsibility in the event of a fatal accident? AVs necessarily create conditions in which “drivers” yield agency to a machine. The current study examines how people make attributions of blame and praise in this context. Varying the features of AV technology affected how responsible a “driver” (who purchased the vehicle) is perceived to be following a deadly crash. The findings provide support for agency and commission as crucial bases of moral judgment. They also raise questions about how morally contradictory actions are perceived and underscore the need for research examining how moral responsibility is distributed among multiple potentially culpable agents. Pragmatically, these findings suggest that regulating (or declining to regulate) how AVs are programmed may strongly influence perceptions of moral and legal culpability.
BaronJ.RitovI. (1994). Reference points and omission bias. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 59, 475–498.
2.
BartelsD. M.BaumanC. W.CushmanF. A.PizarroD. A.McGrawA. P. (2015). Moral judgment and decision making. In KerenG.WuG. (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making (pp. 478–515). Chichester, England: Wiley.
3.
BenthamJ. (1983). The collected works of Jeremy Bentham: Deontology, together with a table of the springs of action; and the article on utilitarianism. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1879)
4.
BigmanY. E.TamirM. (2016). The road to heaven is paved with effort: Perceived effort amplifies moral judgment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145, 1654–1669.
5.
BonnefonJ.ShariffA.RahwanI. (2016). The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles. Science, 352, 1573–1576.
BuckwalterW.TurriJ. (2015). Inability and obligation in moral judgment. PLoS One, 10, 1–20.
8.
CampbellW. K.SedikidesC. (1999). Self-threat magnifies the self-serving bias: A meta-analytic integration. Review of General Psychology, 3, 23–43.
9.
CharnessG.GneezyU.KuhnM. A. (2012). Experimental methods: Between-subject and within-subject design. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 81, 1–8.
10.
EverettJ. A. C.PizarroD. A.CrockettM. J. (2016). Inference of trustworthiness from intuitive moral judgments. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145, 772–787.
11.
FaulF.ErdfelderE.LangA. G.BuchnerA. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 175–191.
12.
FestingerL. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
13.
FriedrichJ. (2002). On seeing oneself as less self-serving than others: The ultimate self-serving bias? In GriggsR. A. (Eds.), Handbook for teaching introductory psychology: Vol. 3: With an emphasis on assessment (pp. 245–247). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
GerstenbergT.LagnadoD. A. (2010). Spreading the blame: The allocation of responsibility amongst multiple agents. Cognition, 115, 166–171.
16.
GirgisS. (2013). The mens rea of accomplice liability: Supporting intentions. Yale Law Journal, 123, 460–494.
17.
GoodwinG. P. (2015). Moral character in person perception. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 38–44.
18.
GrayK.ScheinC. (2017). The theory of dyadic morality: Reinventing moral judgment by redefining harm. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 22, 1–39.
19.
GrayK.ScheinC.WardA. F. (2014). The myth of harmless wrongs in moral cognition: Automatic dyadic completion from sin to suffering. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143, 1600–1615.
20.
GrayK.WaytzA.YoungL. (2012). The moral dyad: A fundamental template unifying moral judgment. Psychological Inquiry, 23, 206–215.
21.
GrayK.WegnerD. M. (2009). Moral typecasting: Divergent perceptions of moral agents and moral patients. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 505–520.
22.
GreeneJ. D.CushmanF. A.StewartL. E.LowenbergK.NystromL. E.CohenJ. D. (2009). Pushing moral buttons: The interaction between personal force and intention in moral judgment. Cognition, 111, 364–371.
23.
HarfordT.SolomonL. (1967). Reformed sinner and lapsed saint strategies in the prisoner’s dilemma game. Journal of Conflict Resolution, XI, 104–109.
24.
KantI. (2002). Groundwork for the metaphysics of morals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1797)
25.
Kordes-de VaalJ. H. (1996). Intention and the omission bias: Omissions perceived as nondecisions. Acta Psychologica, 93, 161–172.
MalleB. F.GuglielmoS.MonroeA. E. (2014). A theory of blame. Psychological Inquiry, 25, 147–186.
28.
MartinB.NewhallJ. (2016). Technology and the guilty mind: When do technology providers become criminal accomplices?The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 105, 95–148.
PizarroD. A.TannenbaumD. (2011). Bringing character back: How the motivation to evaluate character influences judgments of moral blame. In MikulincerM.ShaverP. R. (Eds.), The social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil (pp. 91–108). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
35.
PizarroD. A.UhlmannE.BloomP. (2003). Causal deviance and the attribution of moral responsibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 653–660.
36.
PizarroD.UhlmannE.SaloveyP. (2003). Asymmetry in judgments of moral blame and praise: The role of perceived metadesires. Psychological Science, 14, 267–272.
37.
ScanlonT. M. (1998). What we owe to each other (Vol. 66). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
38.
SearleJ. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
39.
SedikidesC.AlickeM. D. (2012). Self-enhancement and self-protection motives. In RyanR. M. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of human motivation (pp. 303–322). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
40.
SiegelJ.CrockettM. J.DolanR. J. (2017). Inferences about moral character moderate the impact of consequences on blame and praise. Cognition, 167, 201–211.
41.
SingerP. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1, 229–243.
42.
SprancaM.MinskE.BaronJ. (1991). Omission and commission in judgment and choice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 27, 76–105.
43.
SwannW. J.GriffinJ. J.PredmoreS. C. (1987). The cognitive-affective crossfire: When self-consistency confronts self-enhancement. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 52, 881–889.
44.
TannenbaumD.UhlmannE. L.DiermeierD. (2011). Moral signals, public outrage, and immaterial harms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 1249–1254.
45.
UhlmannE. L.PizarroD. A.DiermeierD. (2015). A person-centered approach to moral judgment. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10, 72–81.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
