Shaping Affective Trust in Automated Vehicles: The Interplay of Initial Trust, Gender, and Biophilic Design

With the accelerating embrace of automated vehicles, lack of public trust has become a critical concern worldwide. Nonetheless, the literature shows a significant and thorough effort to increase trust in automated vehicles. Biophilia is one strategy being utilized to establish a trustworthy environment, although it has not yet been applied in the automotive industry, thus, a biophilic interior design was developed and applied in a static driving simulator using a mixed reality headset for investigating the effect on the driving experience. A gender-balanced sample (11 F,11 M) was asked to perform an in-lab experiment and experienced four different driving scenarios, with and without Biophilic interventions. The regression results showed that initial trust is the only effective parameter on affective trust in automated vehicles is <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(P=0.05)$</tex>, and no significant relationship was found between gender and affective trust. As conclusion, the study allowed to assess that initial trust in self-driving cars plays a more important role than gender or driving experience contrary to initial expectations.