How perspective-taking accessibility eliminates the moral hypocrisy between people’s moral judgments and moral behavior.

In preparation for road collisions, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) can be programmed to save the greatest number of lives (utilitarian) or save the passenger at all costs (passenger- protective). In a series of studies, Bonnefon et al. (2016) revealed a moral hypocrisy between peoples’ moral judgments and behaviors; people do not want to buy the utilitarian AV that they judge to be the most moral. I argue that the cause for this moral hypocrisy is partial perspective-taking (PT) accessibility in hypothetical scenarios (only the perspective of the passenger is accessible to participants). I demonstrate that presenting full PT accessibility (the perspective of the passenger and pedestrians) to participants eliminates the moral hypocrisy. In particular, informed by their utilitarian moral judgments, participants are more willing to ride, buy, and spend money on utilitarian than passenger-protective AVs. These novel findings provide AV manufacturers and policymakers with new evidence regarding consumers’ ethical preferences for AVs.