Tech&Work Psychology Lab

25/09/2026

A wave, a wink, and your brain already treats it like a "someone". 🤖👋

That's anthropomorphism at work: we read social intent into faces and gestures, even from a machine.

At the Work & Tech Psych Lab we study what this means when robots share our workplaces: trust, unease, and how close we let them get.

Friendly or unsettling? 👇

24/09/2026

Can an object be photogenic? You tell us!

23/09/2026

Staying on a sustainable career path may become even harder as automation and robotics reshape what work looks like and which skills last. Research on what keeps careers healthy, meaningful, and viable over the long term is therefore becoming increasingly important. The new review co-authored by Dr Jaroslaw Grobelny with from our lab maps how this field defines and measures career sustainability.

This review aims to synthesise the current understanding of sustainable careers by exploring definitions, models, measures, and related constructs, addressing the multidimensional nature of the topic and highlighting areas for further research. Following PRISMA guidelines and the SPIDER framework, i...

10/09/2026

📄 Our new paper has just been published in PLOS ONE, on the Polish adaptation and validation of the Sustainable Career Scale.

🤝 It is the result of an international collaboration that began in Poznań. Angela Russo from Università di Catania and Universitas Mercatorum came to us on an Erasmus stay and presented a way of thinking about careers that questions the very question of whether a career is successful. It proposes instead to look at a career through four dimensions: happiness, health, productivity, and a sense of contribution to society. She invited us to study this together, and that is how our Polish Italian team came about.

🧪 In the article we show that the instrument measuring sustainable career works reliably and validly in the Polish cultural context as well, and that the four dimensions of the concept are clearly distinct from one another. The studies covered over a thousand working people in total, part of them in a longitudinal design.

👥 All data, materials, and the full Polish version of the scale are openly available.

💡 This is only the beginning of the project, and we will be sharing further work soon.

09/09/2026

🧠 dr Jarosław Grobelny, member of our Lab, has joined the Editorial Board of Brain Theory and Intelligence Science, a newly established Springer Nature journal.

🔍 The journal focuses on novel intelligence science: how the brain works, how intelligence emerges, and how those principles translate into artificial intelligence and brain-inspired systems. Its scope runs from neural information processing to behavioural function, an area where neuroscience, AI, and psychology meet.

📄 It will publish both fundamental brain theory and applied work, including brain-inspired computational models and intelligent hardware design, and is welcoming its first submissions now.

26/08/2026

🔍 Most research on AI job anxiety asks who is at risk: which occupations are exposed, which tasks are automatable. Far less attention goes to how AI is talked about. We tested that directly, and our is now available on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.14609

🧪 In a preregistered (N = 316), participants watched compilations of short social media videos. One condition emphasised operating and deciding independently of human oversight; the other emphasised human control, regulation, and governance. None of the videos mentioned job loss. Turns out that sole exposure to the AI-control condition increased job replacement anxiety.

📊 Then, a survey (N = 995) reproduced the association outside the lab, adding to external validity of the results.

⚠️ Two findings ran against our predictions. 1) Perceived usefulness of AI did not buffer anxiety. People who considered AI more useful were more anxious about replacement, regardless of which narrative they saw. 2) Perceived ease of use did nothing at all. Effort-related appraisals may simply be irrelevant when someone is not a user of a technology but a potential subject of its consequences.

💡 The practical implication is uncomfortable. Job replacement anxiety can be triggered by how AI agency is framed, before any measurable labour-market change occurs. Communication about AI is not neutral with respect to employee well-being.

Data, materials, preregistration: https://osf.io/yrjg4/

As artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly diffuses and concerns about job displacement intensify, the psychological mechanisms underlying AI job replacement anxiety remain insufficiently understood. Drawing on Integrated Fear Acquisition Theory and the Technology Acceptance Model, the present research...

31/07/2026

Zapraszamy do obejrzenia materiału Radio Meteor z wizyty na naszym laboratorium :)

27/07/2026

22/07/2026

Jeżeli nie mieliście okazji przesłuchać wczorajszej audycji "Rada Jutra" w Radio Poznań, nic straconego! Sprawdźcie ich stronę (link w komentarzu) i posłuchajcie o naszych nowych planach badawczych i wykorzystaniu robota w rozwoju psychologii pracy i organizacji.

fot. Szymon Majchrzak (Radio Poznań)

20/07/2026

Zapraszamy do słuchania jutrzejszego wydania "Radio Jutra" od Radio Poznań, w którym posłuchacie relacji z wizyty w naszym Labie :)