CORTEX conference by Jean-François Bonnefon

We need to program self-driving cars to make decisions about who should be saved in priority during a crash. We need to decide which covid patient will receive artificial ventilation when there are more patients than ventilators. We need to decide in which order we give people the covid vaccine, as long as we do not have enough doses for everyone. These are three examples of policies that directly or indirectly allocate life and death, and that are developed under high public scrutiny. In such cases, it is important to be aware of which priorities are the most acceptable to the public, in order to avoid loss of trust, opt-out behaviors, and policy instability. I will summarize three research programs that attempted to identify these priorities through large-scale, multinational experimental surveys. Specifically, through choice experiments, we measured in 100+ countries which road users people want self-driving cars to save in priority when a crash is unavoidable; we measured in 20 countries which covid patients people think should get a ventilator when there are not enough ventilators for all patients; and we measured in 13 countries which citizens people want to have priority access for covid vaccines when there are not enough doses to vaccinate everyone in the short-term.

The speaker will also be available for one-on-one meetings. You can book a 15 minute slot by sending an email to jennifer.beneyton@inserm.fr