Autistic Traits, Theory of Mind, and Implications for IT Professionals’ Emotional Labor and Mental Wellbeing

Departing from the situation-centric approach common in emotional labor research, we adopt a trait-based perspective to examine how autistic traits shape IT professionals’ experiences with social demands and mental health. Across three quantitative studies — two with IT professionals and one with college students preparing for IT careers — autistic traits are consistently central to IT identities. IT professionals as a group are likely underdiagnosed and, on average, exhibit elevated autistic traits. These traits in turn heighten their emotional labor and erode mental wellbeing. Compared with the general population, IT professionals on average report substantially higher levels of anxiety and depression, with prevalence rates more than 2.3 times the norm, underscoring the potential mental health costs of sustained emotional labor. These findings suggest that emotional labor is not merely situational but anchored in dispositional factors that are widespread within the IT profession. Results from the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test further show that the theory of mind task is more laborious for IT students than for business management students, thus providing a socio-cognitive explanation for many IT professionals’ social challenges. Taken together, these findings advance a disposition-centric paradigm that expands the nomological net of emotional labor and calls for a reexamination of long-standing assumptions about IT work, IT worker identities, and the broader discourse on neurodiversity in technical professions. It challenges scholars and practitioners alike to embrace autistic traits as an integral and foundational element of professional identity and to reimagine IT management as managing neurodiversity.