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When cooperation is needed: the effect of spatial and time distance and criticality on willingness to cooperate

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Abstract

In the future, car-to-car communication and car-to-infrastructure communication will be a central part of automated driving experience. Cooperative interactive driving is seen as a promising approach, in which cars interact cooperatively with drivers and the environment. However, to ensure drivers’ acceptance and their trust in such systems, it is important to understand the underlying mechanisms of human cooperation in traffic context. Therefore, this study investigated potential influencing parameters for cooperative behaviour in a lane change situation on a highway. As central influencing parameters the situation’s criticality and the distance in time and space to the driver asking for cooperation were manipulated. This was done by selecting appropriate levels for the time to collision (TTC) in conjunction with the variation of distances to other involved agents. In a video-based experiment with the perspective of driving on the left lane, 43 participants (M = 23.2 years; SD = 4.26 years) had to decide if they would give way to a driver in the right lane situated behind a slower truck. The results showed that the willingness to cooperate was strongly influenced by aspects of the situation: the driver’s costs (operationalized by the distance in time and space to the driver asking for cooperation) and the criticality of the situation for the other driver. A large distance in time and space to the driver asking for cooperation and, therefore, low costs of cooperation facilitate the driver’s willingness to cooperate via accelerating and decelerating. The results also indicated that in situations with high criticality drivers seemed to show strong uncertainty about how to behave or solve this situation. Consequently, cooperatively interacting systems with well-developed user interfaces might support drivers’ cooperative behaviour in critical situations.

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Acknowledgements

This project was funded within the Priority Programme “CoInCar—Cooperatively Interacting Automobiles” of the German Science Foundation DFG.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering, Computer Science and Psychology, Department of Human Factors, Ulm University, Ulm, 89069, Germany

    Tanja Stoll, Fabian Müller & Martin Baumann

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  1. Tanja Stoll
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  2. Fabian Müller
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  3. Martin Baumann
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Correspondence to Tanja Stoll.

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Stoll, T., Müller, F. & Baumann, M. When cooperation is needed: the effect of spatial and time distance and criticality on willingness to cooperate. Cogn Tech Work 21, 21–31 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-018-0523-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-018-0523-x

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