Don't blame me I am only the driver: impact of blame attribution on attitudes and attention to driving task

Key concerns of automobile interface designers are driving performance and safety. As cars include voices for telematics, command and control, warning messages, etc., these voices become an opportunity to affect drivers and their performance. In this experimental study, participants (N=36) spent 20 minutes in a driving simulator. The car presented randomly interspersed warnings about the driver's performance while they were driving. There were three conditions: Driver blame (e.g., "You are driving too fast"), Driver and Car blame ("We are driving too fast"), or Environment blame ("The road is easy to handle at low speeds"). Results indicate that warnings associated with the environment works best. Drivers felt most at-ease, they liked the system, they rated the quality of the car higher, and their measured attention to the road was better than the other conditions. Implications for in-car interaction systems are discussed.