Humans Take More Blame Than Cars for Killing Pedestrians

Freeman writes:

Tonight, drivers in the US will kill more pedestrians than any other night of the year. An increase in people walking in low-light conditions makes Halloween the most dangerous night of the year for pedestrians.
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In "bad intervention" scenarios, the main driver (either human or machine) makes a driving decision that would avoid hitting the pedestrian, but the secondary driver intervenes with the wrong call, resulting in a collision. In bad interventions, it makes sense that the secondary driver is really the one to blame, since they overrode the correct actions of the primary driver.

This expectation matches how people reacted. When participants saw this scenario and rated how blameworthy each driver was and how much they caused the death, on a scale of 1 to 100, the secondary driver came out bearing most of the blame. This was true whether or not the secondary driver was a human or machine.

In "missed intervention" scenarios, though, things looked a little different. In these scenarios, the main driver is the one who makes the wrong call, but the secondary driver doesn't intervene to rescue the situation. In these scenarios, both drivers made an error.

Participants did apportion some blame to both drivers in these scenarios-but the human took more blame than the car.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/10/humans-take-more-blame-than-cars-for-killing-pedestrians/
Nature Human Behaviour, 2018. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0762-8 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0762-8

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