(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. Could voice assistants reduce social discomfort in a car? 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 impacts for engineering and design, and explore the limitations of current large language models in addressing social discomfort on the road.