Whose Responsibility, Humans or Automation?

In human-automation interaction (HAI), humans, particularly the actual users of automation, are prone to demonstrating self-serving bias (SSB)—overestimating their own contributions to the human-automation team while underestimating the contributions of the automation. Drawing on insights from attribution studies, we have identified factors that may influence this bias and examined how users perceive these factors differently when considering themselves versus the automation. To test our hypotheses, we developed a simulated self-driving car platform for use in a laboratory experiment. We anticipate that this paper will be among the few that focus on the actual user’s perspective through real experimental tasks, thereby enriching attribution theory by providing a unique HAI perspective.