The Formation of Trust in Autonomous Vehicles after Interacting with Robotaxis on Public Roads

Existing research regarding users' trust in automation has identified associations between trust and users' personality dimensions, including neuroticism and extraversion ( Merritt et al., 20 08; Hoff et al., 20 15) . Additionally, PI, which reflects an individual's tendency to accept novel experienc es and technologies, has been found to be associated with openness to A V adoption ( Deb et al., 2017) . On the other hand, e xisting research on pedestrian - A V interactions primarily relied on laboratory simulations or closed - road field studies, which, though, has provide d valuable theoretical insights (Chang et al., 2024; Clamann et al., 2017; Ma-hadevan et al., 2019), often oversimplif ied the complexity of real - world traffic environments by neglecting the dynamic and unpredictable characteristics of urban ecosystems (Beggiato et al., 2017) and nullified the risks that pedestrians may face in real - world traffic scenarios . As a result, there is still a gap regarding how pedestrians ' trust in A Vs evolves in dynamic, highly interactive real - world scenarios. Addressing thi s gap is essential for accurately capturing the evolution of pedestrians' attitudes toward A V technology and providing actionable insights for optimizing A V design. Thus, a user experiment was conducted at a real - world uncontrolled urban road intersection where participants interacted with commercially running robot taxis that can be categorized as Level 4 by the S ociety of A utomotive E ngineers (SAE) ( SAE international, 2021) . By evaluating participants' perception of A Vs before and after they interacted with the A Vs, for the first time, we explored how interacting with the A Vs can affect the formation of participants' trust in A Vs . Further, given that individual differences, such as personalit y ( Kraus et al., 202 1; Nordhoff et al., 202 5) and p ersonal i nnovativeness ( Hegner et al., 20 19) have been found to influence users' trust in A Vs, we also explored the factors that can moderate pedestrians' trust in A Vs during the interaction process. METHODS Experimental Site As shown in Figure 1, t he experiment was conducted at an uncontrolled intersection with a zebra crossing but without a traffic light on a straight, two - way urban road .