Influences of Information Valence Manipulation on Aging Drivers' Attitudes Toward Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Autonomous Vehicles

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles (AV) are rapidly evolving and being introduced to drivers. The usage of these systems stands to provide innumerable safety and convenience benefits to people of all ages. If individuals possessing more positive valuations of technologies are more likely to use them, then it is reasonable to presume that research on how peoples’ attitudes can be influenced will provide valuable insight into how to potentially increase consumer adoption. In that regard we wanted to investigate whether presenting the same information in different ways resulted in different judgments of ADAS and AV, and whether presenting the same information to different types of people also had significant varying results.Based on previous knowledge, we expected age and information valence manipulation to be factors that would influence attitudes. This thesis provided a sample of peoples’ (N = 174) reported attitudes on ADAS and AV, after reading relevant information presented either in a positive, negative, or neutral manner. In an Analysis of Variance assessing ADAS attitudes, there was a significant main effect of age, suggesting that older adults age 50+ reported more positive sentiment toward ADAS compared to younger adults. When analyses further divided age into younger, middle-age, and older adults, results found a significant effect of age for both ADAS and AV, indicating that older adults evaluated ADAS more positively and AV more negatively than younger adults. There was no significant main effect of experimental condition; there was insufficient evidence that manipulating the valence of positive or negative information influenced ADAS and AV attitudes.