AUTHOR=Rovira Ericka , McLaughlin Anne Collins , Pak Richard , High Luke 

TITLE=Looking for Age Differences in Self-Driving Vehicles: Examining the Effects of Automation Reliability, Driving Risk, and Physical Impairment on Trust

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=10

YEAR=2019

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00800

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00800

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=<sec><title>Purpose</title><p>Self-driving cars are an extremely high level of autonomous technology and represent a promising technology that may help older adults safely maintain independence. However, human behavior with automation is complex and not straightforward (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B59">Parasuraman and Riley, 1997</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B54">Parasuraman, 2000</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B68">Rovira et al., 2007</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B61">Parasuraman and Wickens, 2008</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B56">Parasuraman and Manzey, 2010</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="B55">Parasuraman et al., 2012</xref>). In addition, because no fully self-driving vehicles are yet available to the public, most research has been limited to subjective survey-based assessments that depend on the respondents’ limited knowledge based on second-hand reports and do not reflect the complex situational and dispositional factors known to affect trust and technology adoption.</p></sec><sec><title>Methods</title><p>To address these issues, the current study examined the specific factors that affect younger and older adults’ trust in self-driving vehicles.</p></sec><sec><title>Results</title><p>The results showed that trust in self-driving vehicles depended on multiple interacting variables, such as the age of the respondent, risk during travel, impairment level of the hypothesized driver, and whether the self-driving car was reliable.</p></sec><sec><title>Conclusion</title><p>The primary contribution of this work is that, contrary to existing opinion surveys which suggest broad distrust in self-driving cars, the ratings of trust in self-driving cars varied with situational characteristics (reliability, driver impairment, risk level). Specifically, individuals reported less trust in the self-driving car when there was a failure with the car technology; and more trust in the technology in a low risk driving situation with an unimpaired driver when the automation was unreliable.</p></sec>