I really, really want to repeat this test with something furry. Anybody know of an affordable toy mammal that might withstand getting hit by an SUV repeatedly?
I once hit some sort of large bird on the highway when it flew directly into my lane from a cluster of bushes off the shoulder. It was so close to me when it entered my lane that all that registered was "white, flying." There was no way I could have avoided hitting it, but I had to pull off the road to bawl over it for a few minutes. I don't expect people to react the same way I did, but I definitely expect them to not intentionally kill roadside wildlife.
EDIT: It would also be a great idea to run a test with a fake cat. People have all sorts of reasons for discounting the suffering of animals, but it would be very, very difficult to justify killing something that is somewhat likely to be someone's beloved pet. It would also be more visible than a tarantula, snake, or turtle, which might prevent the number of hits from being deflated as the result of a certain percentage of drivers not seeing the dummy at all.
Leaving people to believe they just killed a cat, maybe to regret it later, isn't being kind to the people.
Pardon the sensationalist headline of that article:
I was not aware of the other turtle and snake studies.
Note that with turtle this is the lower bound on percentage of evil; a perfectly amoral person that could e.g. kill for modest and unimportant sum of money or any other reason would still have no incentive to steer to drive over a turtle; and a significant percentage of people would simply fail to notice the turtle entirely.
This gives interesting prior for mental model of other people. Even at couple percent, psychopathy is much more common than notable intelligence or many other situations considered 'rare' or 'unlikely'. It appears to me that due to the politeness and the necessary good-until-proven-evil strategy, many people act as if they have an incredibly low prior for psychopathy, which permits easy exploitation by psychopaths. There may also be signaling reasons for pretending to have very low prior for psychopathy as one of the groups of people with high prior for psychopathy is psychopaths themselves; pretending easily becomes too natural, though.
Perhaps adjusting the priors could improve personal safety and robustness with regards to various forms of exploitation, whenever the priors are set incorrectly.