(Social) Trouble on the Road: Understanding and Addressing Social Discomfort in Shared Car Trips

Unpleasant social interactions on the road can negatively affect driving safety. At the same time, researchers have attempted to address social discomfort by exploring Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) as social mediators. Before knowing whether CUIs could reduce social discomfort in a car, it is necessary to understand the nature of social discomfort in shared rides. To this end, we recorded nine families going on drives and performed interaction analysis on this data. We define three strategies to address social discomfort: contextual mediation, social mediation, and social support. We discuss considerations for engineering and design, and explore the limitations of current large language models in addressing social discomfort on the road.