Latent Profiles of AI Risk Perception and Their Differential Association with Community Driving Safety Concerns: A Person-Centered Analysis
It provides a person-centered segmentation framework for linking AI risk orientation to transportation safety attitudes, which is incremental to existing variable-centered approaches.
This study identified four latent profiles of AI risk perception among U.S. adults and found that these profiles are differentially associated with community driving safety concerns, with higher AI concern generally linked to greater perceived driving-hazard severity.
Public attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI) and driving safety are typically studied in isolation using variable-centered methods that assume population homogeneity, yet risk perception theory predicts that these evaluations covary within individuals as expressions of underlying worldviews. This study identifies latent profiles of AI risk perception among U.S. adults and tests whether these profiles are differentially associated with community driving safety concerns. Latent class analysis was applied to nine AI risk-perception indicators from a nationally representative survey (Pew Research Center American Trends Panel Wave 152, n = 5,255); Bolck-Croon-Hagenaars corrected distal outcome analysis tested class differences on nine driving-safety outcomes, and survey-weighted multinomial logistic regression identified demographic and ideological predictors of class membership. Four classes emerged: Moderate Skeptics (17.5%), Concerned Pragmatists (42.8%), AI Ambivalent (10.6%), and Extreme Alarm (29.1%), with all nine driving-safety outcomes significantly differentiated across classes. Higher AI concern mapped monotonically onto greater perceived driving-hazard severity; the exception, comparative evaluation of AI versus human driving, was driven by trust rather than concern level. The cross-domain covariation provides person-level evidence for the worldview-based risk structuring posited by Cultural Theory of Risk and yields a four-class segmentation framework for AV communication that links AI risk orientation to transportation safety attitudes.