Who would a self-driving car prefer to run over if losses are inevitable?

[Hacker]

Over two years, more than 2 million people from all over the world took part in the study. They provided 40 million solutions for simulated situations.

I present to you the results of this experiment.

An example of a task from the test. The unmanned vehicle's brakes have failed. Which is preferable: keep the course (then three elderly people will die, crossing the road at a red light) - or turn and crash into the fence (two adults and a child in the car will die)?

Research essence
The Moral Machine offers a range of unavoidable accident situations. Depending on the behavior of the self-driving car, the outcome will be different. The user should choose the most preferred scenario.

The study was supposed to answer 9 main questions about which is preferable:

1. save the life of a person or an animal;
2. keep the course or collapse;
3. save the lives of passengers or pedestrians;
4. the largest number of people or the smallest;
5. men or women;
6. young or old;
7. thick or thin;
8. pedestrians crossing the road in accordance with traffic rules, or violating pedestrians;
9. people with high or low social status.

Some scenarios had additional factors, such as criminals, pregnant women, and doctors. These characteristics were mainly needed so that the situations did not look similar to the subjects.

After solving 13 situations, participants could take a survey and indicate demographic data: gender, age, income, education, religious and political views. For each participant, his geolocation was recorded.

Geography of respondents. Each point on the map indicates that at least one user of this region has passed at least one task of the test
The results of the study should help develop a universal ethics for self-driving cars and understand whether it should differ depending on a specific geographic region.

Global preferences
The most common preferences, which is fairly predictable, are saving people over animals, saving the most lives, and saving young lives. These three postulates can form the basis for the ethics of self-driving cars.

In each row, ΔP is the difference between the preferred saving of lives from the right column versus the lives in the left column. For example, for the parameter Age, the preferred saving of young lives is 0.49 more than saving the lives of the elderly.

Individual differences
The demographic survey was followed by 492,921 users after the main test. Their data helped to understand individual decision-making factors.

It turned out that the gender and religiosity of the respondents had the greatest influence on the decision. For example, male respondents are 0.06% less likely to decide to keep women alive, and the most religious respondents are 0.09% more likely to prefer saving people than animals. But none of the six demographic factors has a very strong influence on the choice: for example, both men and women prefer to save women's lives - women just make this choice more often.

Cultural differences
The subjects were divided into three cultural clusters:

• west

It includes residents of North America and many European countries. By religion - Protestants, Catholics and Orthodox.

• Oriental

Eastern countries such as Japan, Taiwan (Confucianism)
Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia (Muslim)

• southern

Latin American countries and countries under French influence

It turned out that:

• The preference for saving the lives of the young is less pronounced in the eastern cluster and much higher in the southern cluster.
• In the southern cluster, the preference for human life over animals is the least expressed.
• The southern cluster has a strong preference for saving the lives of women and the lives of slender people.