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Comfortable Helplessness: Proxy Control and the Making of Dormant Psychological Needs in AI-Delegated Work

2026-08-24

Abstract excerpt

<title>Abstract</title> <p>Losing control over an outcome reduces willingness to invest effort, and part of that cost is carried by negative affect that makes the loss noticeable. This paper asks what happens when control is displaced not by an aversive environment but by a reliable one. It proposes comfortable helplessness: a reduction in psychological need satisfaction, produced by dependable automated control,...

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Literature Corpus work
02057fcf-e9f2-5060-9c3d-9b032cf29cd9
DOI
10.21203/rs.3.rs-10628079/v1
Open publication

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Comfortable Helplessness: Proxy Control and the Making of Dormant Psychological Needs in AI-Delegated WorkDOI 10.21203/rs.3.rs-10628079/v1
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