People Prefer Their Jobs To Be Taken By Robots, Not Other Workers

By Emily Reynolds The rise of automation has already had a significant impact on the work lives of millions of people — and it shows no signs of stopping. In a study released earlier this year, the Office for National Statistics found 1.5 million workers in Britain at “high risk of losing their jobs to automation”, with women and low-paid workers bearing the brunt of the risk. And another paper published in Social Science and Medicine found that exposure to automation risk exacerbated poor health: higher risk of automation meant higher job uncertainty and subsequently a greater chance of physical and mental health problems. All of which makes the findings of a new Nature Human Behaviour study on almost 2,000 North American and European participants even more surprising. While most people prefer it when workers are replaced by humans, not robots, the majority of those surveyed said that if their job was at risk, they would find it less upsetting for it to be handed to robots rather than other employees. In an initial series of studies, Armin Granulo from the Technical University of Munich and colleagues asked participants to imagine a scenario where a company was to replace its employees either with new staff or with robots. When participants imagined they were just an observer, 67% said they would rather staff were replaced by other humans. But when they imagined that they were a staff member themselves, only 40% said they would prefer to be replaced by a human ov...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Occupational The self Source Type: blogs