How virtue signalling makes us better: Moral preferences with respect to autonomous vehicle type choices

Autonomous vehicles (henceforth AVs) are about to be introduced to the mass market. However, many moral questions concerning AVs still remain. One of the issues has to do with the choice between AV types that differ in their built-in algorithms for dealing with situations of unavoidable lethal collision. These situations will probably be rare, yet they will happen and are of concern to governments, manufactures, and the potential users of AVs. It does not appear to be possible to avoid questions about how these algorithms should be designed. We present the results of our study of moral preferences (N=2769) with respect to three types of AVs: (1) selfish, which protects the lives of passenger(s) over any number of bystanders; (2) altruistic, which minimizes the number of casualties, even if this leads to death of passenger(s); and (3) conservative, which abstains from interfering in such situations.We differentiate between scenarios in which participants are to make their decisions privately or publicly, and for themselves or for their offspring. We aim to answer two research questions: (1) Whether the public visibility of the choice of an AV type choice make this choice more more altruistic and (2) which type of situation makes it more difficult to choose altruistically: when choosing for society as a whole, when choosing only for oneself, or when choosing only for one’s offspring.Our results show that respondents exhibit a preference for an altruistic strategy for AVs and that it is reinforced when signalled to others. The altruistic preference is strongest when applies to everybody else, weaker when it reflects a solely personal choice, and weakest when choosing for one’s own child. We conclude that a public choice is considerably more likely to pressure consumers into accepting a more socially beneficial solution, making it a reasonable and inexpensive way to shift car owners towards higher altruism.