Automation's Not Perfect but Neither Are We: Unveiling Illusionary Control and Automation Bias in Automated Driving

Abstract

If we want to develop automated vehicles that are truly human-centered, we need to keep in mind that our reasoning ability is far from "flawless", as we are susceptible to inherent cognitive biases. With this work, we aim to systemically investigate cognitive biases in the context of automated driving for the first time. Using an online study (N = 99) and a short experiment (N = 21), we investigated two exemplary cognitive biases (1. illusion of control and 2. automation bias). Our results suggest that both can occur during automated driving. Specifically, we found that not only a greater amount of information about vehicle behavior but also the humanization of this information can lead to an (illusory) higher sense of control.