EXPOSED
This residual category bundles forensic, health, sport, developmental, and research psychologists — the modal worker sits in government, hospital, university, or consulting settings doing assessment, program evaluation, research design, and report writing rather than a full-time therapy caseload. Literature review, survey and test-score analysis, protocol drafting, and first-draft evaluation reports are now cheap for AI, which hollows out a large share of billable hours. What holds is the in-person clinical interview and behavioral observation, expert testimony and defensible sign-off on high-stakes determinations (custody, fitness-for-duty, risk of violence), and ownership of interpretive calls where instruments disagree — though only the licensed subset carries a real regulatory shield, and that shield is a policy choice, not physics.
Headcount grew steadily across the period.
Median pay $101,790 → $110,840 -12.9% in real terms
This line is counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the one figure on this page that isn't a judgement of ours. Headcount moves on demand, offshoring, demographics and the business cycle, and automation is one term among several, often not the loudest.
So a falling line is not evidence that AI did it, and a rising one is not evidence that it won't. Both happen in this register: some occupations resist automation and shrink anyway, others are highly automatable and keep growing. The marked year is 2020.
BLS projection, 2024–2034
+4.3%
Percentage only. The projection counts a different population from the 18,820 above — it includes self-employed workers, which for this occupation is most of them, so the two headcounts are not comparable.
Growing, and only partly exposed
The BLS expects +4.3% more of these jobs by 2034, and at 54/100 the work is only partly exposed — some tasks are automatable, the core of the job is not. Nothing here is in tension.
Different clocks. The score is what current AI could do to this work today. The projection is how many of these jobs will exist in 2034. Everything between the two — how fast employers actually adopt, whether demand grows in the meantime — is why they can point opposite ways without either being wrong.
~3,900 openings a year on average, including replacing people who leave.
EthnologistPaleologistPhilologistGroup TesterMental TesterMetaphysicistPsychometristBiopsychologistPsychodramatistPsychometricianPsychotherapistBehavior AnalystSocial ScientistSports TherapistNeuropsychologistBehavioral AnalystStaff PsychologistHealth PsychologistScientific LinguistSocial PsychologistSports PsychologistBehavioral ScientistBehavioral SpecialistForensic Psychologist
The BLS uses Psychologists, All Other for work that doesn't fit any named occupation, so it covers roles that have little in common with each other. Two consequences worth knowing before you read anything below:
Holding it up: judgment & accountability . Weakest point: embodiment .
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier At 11 the split is roughly even: the literature synthesis, scale scoring, norm comparison, regression on program-evaluation data, and boilerplate sections of a psychological report are already machine work, while the structured clinical interview, behavioral observation of a child or a police officer under stress, and cross-examination-proof formulation of findings still require a person in the room.
Some physical or field component A 6 reflects travel to jails, schools, clinics, training facilities and courtrooms plus hands-on test administration — WAIS blocks, gait or exertion protocols, developmental play tasks — but the environments are booked rooms with controlled conditions, and most of the week is still spent at a desk writing.
Certification preferred, not legally required 10 is the honest average of a mixed group: forensic and health psychologists in this residual bucket typically hold state licences and their signature on a fitness-for-duty or risk assessment is personally discoverable, but sport consultants, program evaluators, and PhD research psychologists in this same SOC code often practise under titles that no state licensing board controls.
Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls 14 is earned by the calls with no clean answer and real consequences — recommending a custody arrangement, declaring an officer unfit to return to duty, estimating violence risk when the PAI and the collateral records disagree, deciding whether a validity scale means malingering — where the psychologist names one conclusion and defends it under oath.
The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.
Your task mix speaks to task resistance (11/20 here) — how much of the day's work current AI already does. That is the dimension the boxes above are about.
It cannot move the other three. Liability shield (10/20) is whether the law requires a licensed human to sign. Trust premium (13/20) is whether buyers specifically pay for a person. Judgment and accountability (14/20) is whether the role exists to own consequential calls. Those are facts about the occupation's standing, not about which tasks are in your week — a paralegal who does only trial exhibits still holds no licence. Together they are 37 of this occupation's 54 points (69%).
Embodiment (6/20) is also a property of the work rather than the worker, but we don't tag individual tasks as physical or not, so the picker can't tell you anything about it. That's a limit of this tool, not a claim.
Did we get the list right? Tell us what's missing — the tasks are written from the outside, and you're reading this from the inside.
The moves above are yours to make. This is the other half: what would have to change in the world for the occupation itself to score higher. None of it is in any one person's gift, but it is where the floor actually comes from. Scores here are not a one-way ratchet. Only two of the five dimensions — task resistance and embodiment — track what machines can do. The other three track law, what buyers will pay for, and who is answerable, and those move in both directions, often in response to the same pressure AI creates. If every lever below landed, this occupation would score around 67/100 — SAFE.
State psychology boards or court rules explicitly barring AI-generated psychological evaluations from being admitted or billed unless a licensed psychologist personally conducted the interview and signs under personal liability — the model exists in APA's 2024-25 health-advisory work on AI and in state telehealth/AI-disclosure bills (e.g., Illinois' 2025 law restricting AI in therapy services and Utah's mental-health chatbot act). Also: forensic sign-off requirements under Daubert/FRE 702 as amended Dec 2023, where a testifying expert must vouch for the basis of the opinion.
Task-mix shift: once literature review, scoring, and first-draft reports are automated, the residual job is discordant-instrument interpretation, live behavioral observation, malingering/effort detection, and cross-examination-survivable reasoning. This occupation genuinely has two tiers, and the remaining tier is the judgment tier.
Court-appointed or agency-appointed evaluator rosters (custody, fitness-for-duty, competency, violence risk under Tarasoff-type duties) naming an individual psychologist as the accountable decision-maker, with malpractice and board exposure attached to the determination rather than to the tool output.
Institutional buyers (courts, insurers, professional sports leagues, disability adjudicators) writing contract language requiring a named human evaluator — e.g., SSA consultative examination rules or league concussion/mental-health protocols specifying an in-person licensed examiner.
The limit. The research, program-evaluation, and psychometric-analysis segment of this residual category has no licensure hook and no named-human buyer; levers above apply almost entirely to the forensic and clinical-assessment subset, so the aggregate score for the SOC cannot rise far.
| Chicago-Naperville-Elgin, IL-IN | 920 | $69,820 -37% |
| New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ | 790 | $132,220 +19% |
| Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 770 | $129,730 +17% |
| Portland-Vancouver-Hillsboro, OR-WA | 690 | $86,680 -22% |
| Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, CA | 470 | $153,630 +39% |
| Milwaukee-Waukesha, WI | 450 | $80,200 -28% |
| Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH | 440 | $112,900 +2% |
| Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX | 440 | $80,660 -27% |
| Cincinnati, OH-KY-IN | 210 | $185,390 +67% |
| San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 110 | $175,160 +58% |
| San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA | 300 | $168,040 +52% |
We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.
That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 54. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.
Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.
Rather than check back: get the digest and we'll tell you what changed — or watch a single occupation from its own page.