Emotional Feedback to Mitigate Aggressive Driving: A Real-World Driving Study

摘要

Without doubt, aggressive driving is a serious hazard on our roads. The problem with common measures against aggressive driving (e.g., speeding cameras) is that they force drivers to change their behavior, which can make them feel even more aggressive and lead to reactance. As an alternative solution that persuades people to drive less aggressively, the Driving Feedback Avatar (DFA) was developed. The DFA is an in-car interface that provides visual feedback on a driver's behavior with a focus on aggressive driving. Summative feedback is represented by an avatar that gradually changes its emotional state depending on the behavior. Instant feedback is given in the form of a flashing light directly after the aggressive action occurred. The paper presents a driving study that investigated the effectiveness of the DFA in real traffic. In a within-subjects design. 32 participants completed a test drive with and without a prototype of the system while their driving behavior was logged. Based on the logs, nine behaviors that were considered indicators of aggressive driving were compared within both conditions. Although participants did not drive significantly less aggressively under the system's influence, it is remarkable that they generally showed less discrete aggressive driving behaviors (e.g., use of indicators) but~contrary to expectations―more continuous ones (e.g., speeding). The paper concludes with directions for future iterations of the DFA.