Socially Adaptive Autonomous Vehicles: Effects of Contingent Driving Behavior on Drivers' Experiences

Social scientists have argued that autonomous vehicles (AVs) need to act as effective social agents; they have to respond implicitly to other drivers' behaviors as human drivers would. In this paper, we investigate how contingent driving behavior in AVs influences human drivers' experiences. We compared three algorithmic driving models: one trained on human driving data that responds to interactions (a familiar contingent behavior) and two artificial models that intend to either always-yield or never-yield regardless of how the interaction unfolds (non-contingent behaviors). Results show that a familiar contingent behavior significantly reduces drivers' hesitance and stress when interacting with AVs. The direct relationship between familiar contingency and positive experience indicates that AVs should incorporate socially familiar driving patterns through contextually-adaptive algorithms to improve the chances of successful deployment and acceptance in mixed human-AV traffic environments.