Social Consensus on Ethical Dilemmas of Autonomous Vehicles in Hong Kong: A Comparison with Collectivist and Individualist Cultures

Autonomous vehicles are fast becoming a reality. There is a corresponding need to protect the public interest and address the moral dilemmas that arise from the adoption of this technology. For example, an autonomous vehicle may encounter situations in which it must sacrifice its passenger to save one or more pedestrians (or vice versa), but there is no current social consensus on the moral acceptability of such a decision. Thus, an empirical investigation is warranted into how individuals interpret and respond to the moral issues involved. To investigate these issues, the proposed study will involve an online experiment in which participants are exposed to three variations of a sacrificial dilemma that requires an autonomous vehicle to make a non-utilitarian (self-interested/protective), utilitarian (self-sacrificial), or strongly utilitarian decision to save or kill its passenger, while imagining themselves to be either a bystander or as a passenger in the vehicle. Participants will complete a survey questionnaire that elicits their moral judgment, moral reasoning, attitude toward the vehicle and purchase intention, and their perceptions of its intelligence and safety. The proposed study will thus shed light on how individuals adopt different moral reasoning strategies (rationalization vs. decoupling) to process moral dilemmas according to their viewpoint (bystander vs. passenger), and how this process shapes their moral judgment and perceptions of the vehicle. This experiment will be conducted in Hong Kong, China, and the United States to examine how culture shapes perceptions of autonomous vehicles. Different cultures have their own standards and moral systems (Cook, 1999), and many researchers have described the cultural differences between Eastern and Western cultures according to a dichotomy between collectivism and individualism (Siegal et al., 2001; Jackson et al., 2008). Given that collectivist and individualist values co-exist in Hong Kong (Lee & Choi, 2006; Hofstede Insights, 2017), the study findings will help us understand how hybrid (Hong Kong), collectivist (China), and individualist (United States) cultures construe and resolve the ethical dilemmas involved in the use of autonomous vehicles. These findings will provide evidence for the notion that morality is “culturally variable” (Haidt, 2007).