Tech&Work Psychology Lab

26/10/2026

🔍 Dr Jaroslaw Grobelny, member of the Tech&Work Psychology Lab, has joined the COST Action : Human-centered Approaches to Responsible Privacy for and with AI.

🇪🇺 What is ? European Cooperation in Science and Technology builds international research networks, called COST Actions, around problems that no single team or country can solve alone. Within an Action, researchers from different disciplines and countries share knowledge and methods, run joint projects, and turn their results into guidelines, tools and recommendations for practitioners and policymakers.

🔐 HARPA starts from a simple observation: AI processes personal data at a scale and speed that most people cannot follow, often with little transparency or meaningful consent. The Action treats not only as a technical or legal problem but as a matter of autonomy, trust and human rights. Its goal runs in two directions: (1) reducing the privacy risks created by , and (2) using AI to build privacy tools that people can actually understand and use. This is why the network brings together computer scientists, lawyers, HCI researchers and psychologists.

🧩 The work is organised in Working Groups: usable AI for informed privacy decisions by users, education of professionals in human-centered privacy, and assessment and guidance of privacy practices in AI development.

🗓️ The plan over the four years includes: a survey of AI privacy principles for curricula, guidelines on the usability and trustworthiness of AI-based auditing and compliance tools, guidelines on accessible ways of explaining AI decisions, a review of research on AI-driven consent mechanisms, a catalogue of privacy risk assessment methods across jurisdictions and sectors, a taxonomy of how AI systems communicate privacy risks, training materials for professionals, early-career researchers and policymakers, a white paper on human-centered privacy and AI, and an open-access repository collecting all outputs.

💡 For our lab this is a natural extension of research on how people respond to AI at work. Attitudes, trust and anxiety toward AI shape whether people use privacy controls at all, and that is where psychology has something concrete to add.

12/10/2026

🤖 W „Życiu Uniwersyteckim” ukazała się rozmowa z dr. Jarosławem Grobelnym o humanoidalnym robocie Agibot A2 Ultra, który trafił do naszego laboratorium na Wydział Psychologii i Kognitywistyki UAM. Rozmowa ukazała się pod tytułem „Uwaga! To tylko komputer na nogach”, który dobrze oddaje jej główną tezę: humanoidalny wygląd nie powinien skłaniać nas do przypisywania maszynie świadomości czy emocji.

https://uniwersyteckie.pl/nauka/dr-jaroslaw-grobelny-uwaga-tylko-komputer-na-nogach

🔍 Robot trafił na uniwersytet z myślą o lekcji z pandemii: badania nad pracą zdalną pojawiły się dopiero po latach, gdy organizacje dawno musiały sobie z nią radzić. Przy robotyzacji chcemy tę lukę uprzedzić i ustalić, jak wprowadzać roboty do miejsc pracy bez szkody dla zdrowia psychicznego.

🧪 W rozmowie m.in. o oddzieleniu efektu nowości od trwałego wpływu robota, o tym, dlaczego wyświetlacz zamiast twarzy chroni Agibota przed doliną niesamowitości, o sygnałach świadczących, że jego obecność szkodzi, oraz o ryzyku, że humanoid jako fizyczne ucieleśnienie modelu językowego jeszcze silniej niż chatboty skłania do traktowania go jak towarzysza.

Zapraszamy do lektury całej rozmowy w Życie Uniwersyteckie.

09/10/2026

To conduct research on human-robot interaction and on how technology affects our health and attitudes at work in a rigorous and valid way, we need a comprehensive, well-rounded understanding of how robots can actually be present in the workplace. That is why the Tech&Work Psychology Lab team took part in a meeting organised by Boston Dynamics for research groups and organisations that use their robots. The meeting was hosted at the remarkable The National Robotarium at Heriot-Watt University, where we could see the human-robot interaction research lab and take a close look at many models of social and industrial robots.

Meetings like this let us check how closely the situations we recreate in experiments resemble the way robots actually work in companies and institutions. Conversations with teams that use them every day also show which questions about human-robot collaboration come up in practice, not only in the literature. So we are coming back with concrete ideas for our next studies!

06/10/2026

Creepy or cute? The National Robotarium

06/10/2026

Even Ameca knows Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu

05/10/2026

🤖 Tomorrow and Wednesday (October 6–7) the Tech&Work psychology Lab team will be in Edinburgh for the EDU User Forum, Boston Dynamics' 2nd Annual Academic User Group, hosted at The National Robotarium.

On the agenda, among other things: Spot and AI, new use cases for the robot (from farming to non-contact medical triage in the DARPA Triage Challenge), user presentations from Harvard and the University of Maryland, and a tour of the Robotarium.

We're going to see how other academic teams work with robots and what we can bring back to our own research on human-robot interaction at work.

02/10/2026

🤖 Our lab AGIBOT has "company". In the first half of 2026, almost 25,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide, up 432% from a year earlier. Of those, 8,600 were AGIBOTs, the "siblings" of our A2 Ultra.

📊 Now the most important part: about 69% of these robots, roughly 17,000 units, went to research and education. So right now humanoids are mainly headed for labs and universities, not industrial production.

💡 That means thousands of research teams around the world are now working with humanoids: checking what they can really do, looking for sensible applications, and testing how to design interaction that people will actually want to use.

🧠 In our lab, we look at this from a work psychology perspective. We are interested in how people react to a robot in their environment, when they start to trust it and when it makes them uneasy, and what that means for designing robots that will one day work alongside people.

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...