Factors Influencing Driver’s Psychological Vulnerability Judgment When Sharing the Road With Driverless Vehicles

Abstract

To judge whether drivers of manned vehicles sharing the road with driverless vehicles think they are in a vulnerable state and find out what makes drivers feel they will be in a state we called “driver’s psychological vulnerability judgment”, this paper conducted a questionnaire to collect information about the attitude, perceived usefulness, trust, perceived risk, and demographic information of drivers in a hypothetical situation involving driving on the same road as driverless vehicles. Our goal was to identify areas where the drivers felt that they would be in a “vulnerable psychological state”, i.e., that they would be more vulnerable to making poor psychological judgments. A total of 945 valid questionnaires were collected through Credamo questionnaire survey platform. The survey results indicated that 43.7 % of the respondents believed that they would be in a vulnerable state in mixed traffic competition, 30.2 % of the respondents did not know whether they would be in a vulnerable state. Further, women, people with a higher education, people with a more aggressive driving personality, older people, and those with more driving experience were more inclined to think that they would not be in a vulnerable state. Attitude, trust, and perceived usefulness all had positive impacts on driver’s psychological vulnerability judgment, and perceived risk had a negative impact. Therefore, the early promotion of driverless technology should give priority to people with a higher education, more driving experience, older age, and more aggressive driving personality, and focus on attitudes towards this technology, and perceived usefulness, trust, perceived risk.