Replication Package – "Human Perception of Ethics in Self-Driving Cars: An Empirical Study"

This repository contains the replication package for the paper "Human Perception of Ethics in Self-Driving Cars: An Empirical Study."

The replication package includes the materials needed to reproduce and inspect the results reported in the paper, such as anonymized survey data, CARLA simulation scripts, screencasts, data-analysis notebooks, the complete survey questionnaire, and the qualitative coding of participants' open-ended responses. These artifacts enable researchers to reproduce the quantitative analyses, inspect the test-case generation and execution process, and trace the reported qualitative findings to the original anonymized responses and assigned codes.

Paper Abstract

Ethical considerations in self-driving cars (SDCs) pose challenges beyond traditional functional or safety metrics. Automated testing frameworks rely on pass–fail as quality criteria for the SDC behavior, but it remains unclear how these outcomes align with human judgments of ethical behavior. To address this gap, we conduct an empirical study with 60 participants to investigate how humans perceive SDC behavior. The study employs test cases in which a pedestrian crosses the road, and the SDC exhibits behaviors varying in ethicality levels (ethical vs. unethical) and functional compliance (pass vs. fail). Participants evaluate each test case as ethical, neutral, or unethical and provide textual justifications for their assessments. The study also examines participants’ perceptions of the relationship between ethical behavior and safety. Our results show that participants reliably identify unethical behavior, whereas ethical test cases elicit mixed responses influenced by pedestrians’ intentions, driving norms, and precautionary actions. Most participants distinguish ethics from safety, indicating that functional pass–fail alone does not capture ethical acceptability. These results highlight the need to integrate human-centered ethical considerations into SDC design and testing, complementing technical safety criteria to better align vehicle behavior with the expectations of humans, thereby capturing aspects that contribute to assessing ethics as well.