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Robots are transforming the nature of human work. Although human–robot collaborations can create new jobs and increase productivity, pundits often warn about how robots might replace humans at work and create mass unemployment. Despite these warnings, relatively little research has directly assessed how laypeople react to robots in the workplace. Drawing from cognitive appraisal theory of stress, we suggest that employees exposed to robots (either physically or psychologically) would report greater job insecurity. Six studies—including two pilot studies, an archival study across 185 US metropolitan areas (Study 1), a preregistered experiment conducted in Singapore (Study 2), an experience-sampling study among engineers conducted in India (Study 3), and an online experiment (Study 4)—find that increased exposure to robots leads to increased job insecurity. Study 3 also reveals that this robot-related …