WU study: When automation harms mental health – Extrajournal.Net

Man vs. the machine. A study by WU Vienna shows the negative impact of automation on the mental health of employees. In particular, the introduction of industrial robots in Germany was examined.

More and more jobs in industry are being automated. In a new study, researchers at the WU Vienna University of Economics and Business examined how this affects the psyche of employees – and there was a clear negative effect, the university said in a press release.

Implications for the growth of industrial robots

Industrial automation continues: in 1990 there were about 400,000 industrial robots worldwide, but by 2020 there were already three million. The most noticeable impact is the loss of jobs in the industries involved. However, little attention has been paid to the effects of self-employment on people who continue to work in these industries – particularly the effects on their mental health, according to WU.

Ana Lucia Abeliansky and Klaus Prettner from the WU Department of Economics and Matthias Beulmann from the University of Göttingen (macroeconomics and development economics) examined this aspect of automation in their study (Abeliansky, AL, Beulmann, M. , & Prettner, K.: Are industrial robots coming for us and the mental health of workers.

“We were able to find that the use of industrial robots is associated with a deterioration in the mental health of workers,” says Abeliansky, summarizing the results. “The main reasons for this seem to be concerns about job security and a reduced sense of involvement in important work.”

Germany as an example

For their study, the researchers focused on Germany: “On the one hand, Germany was one of the countries with the most industrial robots in the world in 2020, but on the other hand, we were able to draw some good points here,” says Abeliansky.

The Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), which is representative of independent household analysis, has been carried out in Germany since 2002. With their help, researchers report the development of the mental health of workers in the sectors 14 different industries, according to WU on this process. They compared the data with the increasing use of robots in different sectors.

It shows that the more intensive use of industrial robots in the industry is accompanied by the deterioration of mental health. “However, this is not a direct result, for example with technophobia – that is, resistance to technology,” explains co-author Klaus Prettner from WU. Instead, the researchers were able to identify two important indirect effects from their analysis.

Fear of unemployment, limited experiences of success

On the other hand, industries increase the fear of job loss. This is especially pronounced among people over 60 years of age and among workers who perform simple and routine tasks.

However, a second indirect effect also has a positive effect on mental health: a reduced perception of success at work. This result surprised the authors because automation can also improve the perception of one’s work by relieving workers from boring and repetitive tasks.

But instead, at least in the results of this work, the negative results were widespread: According to the researchers, the reason for this is probably that automation makes the connection between his work and the final product disappear – and with it the feeling of necessity.

Goals for future research

These results show that automation can also have a more negative impact on workers than job losses, the researchers say. This is important from an economic point of view but also from a social point of view, says co-author Klaus Prettner from the WU: “Our mental health has a strong impact on individual productivity, but also on the well-being and health of That’s why it’s important to research this relationship thoroughly.”

An issue for further research would be the extent to which data from Germany compares with other countries. The question of how other forms of automation affect mental health – such as the use of artificial intelligence – will also be interesting and relevant at the moment, says Prettner.