Mapping the Mindsets: How Americans View AI's Economic Future

I am thrilled to share that I have been awarded a Russell Sage Foundation Presidential Grant for a new project, "Tracking Americans' Causal Beliefs about AI in the Workplace." As an Assistant Professor of AI Governance at Northeastern University—and in my ongoing role as a Research Affiliate at the Linde Center for Science, Society, and Policy (LCSSP)—this work is deeply meaningful to me. And I won't be diving into this alone, either. I am incredibly lucky to be collaborating on this two-year project with Sophie Borwein, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, and R. Michael Alvarez, Flintridge Foundation Professor of Political and Computational Social Science at Caltech and co-director of Caltech's LCSSP.

How We Got Here

This project is a direct evolution of research I first began during my time as a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. Back in November 2023, our team fielded a large-scale YouGov survey of 6,000 Americans and Canadians. We wanted to look under the hood and truly understand how everyday people reason about AI's concrete effects on the economy. We asked tough, essential questions:

● Do people expect AI to complement or completely replace human workers?

● Will it raise or lower wages?

● Is it going to increase or decrease overall hiring?

That initial survey proved to be incredibly productive. It ultimately generated three peer-reviewed publications for us—in the American Journal of Political Science, PNAS Nexus, and the forthcoming Public Opinion Quarterly—as well as a policy piece in Foreign Affairs.

What We Are Exploring Next

This new grant builds most directly on our findings from the Public Opinion Quarterly paper. In that study, we used latent class analysis to identify four distinct "belief types" regarding AI among Americans and Canadians:

● Complementers: Those who view AI as a tool to enhance human capabilities.

● Substituters: Those who see AI as a direct replacement for human labor.

● Skeptics: Those who remain highly doubtful of its promised impacts.

● Uncertains: Those who are still unsure of where the technology lands.

Crucially, we discovered that these mental models aren't just abstract thoughts—they map cleanly onto coherent policy preferences and even vote choice. For example, we found that Substituters are significantly more likely to support restrictive policies like immigration restrictions, automation taxes, and heavy AI regulation, whereas Complementers view the future through a completely different policy lens.

With this new funding, we will be able to track how these beliefs shift over time, giving us a much clearer picture of how the public reacts as AI continues to reshape our workplaces. The team and I look forward to sharing future developments with you!

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