Altruistic or Egocentric, or even Hypocritic? - A Cross-Cultural Study of the Safety Priority Choice of Autonomous Car

How should the autonomous car behave when faced with an unavoidable accident? In particular, in situations where either the driver or the pedestrian will inevitably be killed, whose safety should the autonomous car prioritize? There can be cases in which sacrificing the driver would be the best solution to maximize lives and minimize deaths. And we also need to consider the possibility that the victim could be ourselves. In this cross-cultural study with participants from US, Japan, and China, we investigated the drivers' safety setting preferences and found some interesting cultural differences in such preferences.