Perceived Feeling of Safety

In Autonomous Driving

• Describes the passengers' perceived feeling of safety while riding in a fully autonomous vehicle. As passengers entrust their life to the autonomous vehicle in SAE level 5 autonomous driving, it is essential for them to feel safe.
• Studies have shown that when system autonomy increases, the user’s perceived feeling of safety decreases [1].
• Different feedback modalities can be used to increase the perceived feeling of safety - see Feedback Modality Cards.

Perceived Feeling of Safety Definition

• Humans are loss-averse, which drives them to make choices that will prevent or reduce losses. Because it typically refers to a state of protection from harm that is both currently being experienced and anticipated for the future, safety perception is related to the motivation to avoid losses. [2]
• The perceived feeling safety is "a state in which a person’s most important needs are satisfied and it is expected that this state will remain stable.” [2, p.44]
• There is a direct connection between human needs and the perceived feeling of safety [2, 3].

Evaluating the Perceived Feeling of Safety

Sources

[1] - Hewitt, Charlie, et al. "Assessing public perception of self-driving cars: The autonomous vehicle acceptance model." Proceedings of the 24th international conference on intelligent user interfaces. 2019.

[2] - Eller, Eric, and Dieter Frey. "Psychological perspectives on perceived safety: Social factors of feeling safe." Perceived Safety . Springer, Cham, 2019. 43-60.

[3] - Baumeister, Roy F. "Need-to-belong theory." Handbook of theories of social psychology 2 (2011): 121-140.