ABSTRACT
Over the last few years, autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been intensively studied with regard to their benefits, implications, technological development, and public attitude. Results of previous studies in the literature show that AVs have the potential to offer a large number of benefits. The reduction in the number of road accidents is one of the major benefits of AVs because AVs eliminate human errors that contributes to 90\% of the accidents. In addition, one of the main advantages of AVs is the ability to program these vehicles to operate based on some ethical logic that maximizes the social value of AVs. However, previous studies show that people prefer to buy an AV that is self-protective that an AV that follows moral decisions. These studies provide the participants with partial perspective taking as they were asked to imagine themselves as the passengers of the AV ignoring that the respondents might be the pedestrians in some situations. As a result, this study employed a questionnaire survey in order to understand the impact of accessibility to perspective-taking on the moral decisions of respondents from the USA. The results show that partial perspective taking results in a biased attitude as the respondents select the action that saves their lives at the cost of the others. Moreover, the responses were analyzed based on the demographic properties of the respondents (age, gender, and prior knowledge about AVs). In general, the results show that female and older respondents tend to select the moral action.
