Tilting at the Machine? Control, Deflection, and the Anticipatory Stigma of Automation

• In Event: Joint Roundtables: Social Psychology Section and Sociology of Emotions Section
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 2 - Organizations & Work

Abstract

As automation reshapes occupational fields, do workers recalibrate their sense of threat, or do dispositions formed under earlier conditions of security persist? Drawing on stress process models and sociological social psychology, I conceptualize artificial intelligence (AI) as an anticipatory stressor that threatens occupational identities with obsolescence, what I term the anticipatory stigma of automation. I argue that workers engage in stigma resistance by deflecting this threat through claims of human distinctiveness, but that the efficacy of this deflection depends on a dispositional sense of control cultivated by prior work conditions. Drawing on cross-sectional surveys of Canadian workers (N=7,028, September 2023 to 2025), a longitudinal panel (baseline N=6,283, September 2022 to 2025) and open-text responses (September 2025, N=1,960), I advance two complementary findings. The longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis shows that measures of occupation-level AI exposure predict awareness of automation's relevance but not perceived threat, which is instead structured by job resources that cultivate a sense of control. The qualitative analysis shows that workers across the occupational hierarchy invoke the same defensive deflections between human and machine labour, but that high-control workers experience these deflections as far more protective. This study therefore suggests that while occupational fields are changing due to new forms of automation, the psychological capacity to cope is structurally amplified by past success. All workers claim the same symbolic defenses, but only the secure find them effective.

Author

• Alexander Wilson, University of Toronto