Every organisation that has ever tried to roll out a new technology has encountered the same puzzle. Some people are in immediately — curious, energised, willing to experiment before the manual is written. Others watch from a distance, asking harder questions, waiting for proof. And a third group resists in ways that no amount of training or incentive seems to shift.
The standard explanation reaches for demographics. Age. Education. Tech-savviness. Digital natives versus digital immigrants. These categories are not entirely wrong, but they are surprisingly poor predictors once you look closely. The 55-year-old who was first to explore every new capability and the 28-year-old who still prefers a printed form — they exist in every organisation. Demographics cannot explain them.
Our 2023 paper, Theories of Consciousness and Emergent Technologies: The Impact of Personality on Approaches to Change and Choice, argues that the real explanation runs much deeper — all the way down to the nature of consciousness itself, and to the personality structures through which different human beings experience and make sense of the world.
The Question Nobody Is Asking
When we ask why someone adopts or resists new technology, we are almost always asking the wrong question. We frame it as a question about information (do they understand it?), or incentives (do they want to use it?), or habit (are they comfortable with change?). These are surface questions.
The deeper question is: how does this person experience change itself?
And the answer to that question is shaped by something more fundamental than knowledge or habit. It is shaped by personality — by the characteristic way a person processes experience, constructs meaning, and orients themselves to the world. What we propose is that personality type does not merely correlate with technology adoption behaviour. It predicts it — because different personality types are associated with genuinely different theories of consciousness, different ways of being aware of and responsive to the world.
From Dualism to Something Richer
To understand this, we need to take a brief detour through the philosophy of consciousness — and we promise it is worth it.
The traditional debate has been between two positions. Dualism holds that mind and body are fundamentally different kinds of thing — consciousness is non-physical, irreducible to neurons and circuits. In its modern form, this tradition runs through Bernard Baars’ Global Workspace Theory (consciousness as distributed information-sharing across neural networks), Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (consciousness measurable as the degree of integrated, irreducible information in a system), and Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind (consciousness emerging from the collective activity of many mental agents). These frameworks tend to feel comfortable to people who think analytically and sequentially, who approach the world through systems and abstractions.
Panpsychism takes the opposite view — that consciousness is not the exclusive property of complex brains but a universal feature of reality, present in some form at every level of existence. In its modern expressions, this tradition draws on David Chalmers’ hard problem of consciousness, Alvin Toffler’s vision of collective consciousness evolving with technology, Buckminster Fuller’s sense of all life as a unified system, George Lakoff’s embodied cognition, and John Searle’s argument that consciousness is fundamentally social — constructed through shared language and practice within communities. These frameworks tend to resonate with people who are more holistic, relational, and attuned to context and meaning.
Neither position is wrong. But both, taken alone, are incomplete — and crucially, they map onto genuinely different human orientations.
The paper’s move is to find what C.S. Peirce called Thirdness — a mediating space that transcends the binary. Drawing on Jung’s psychology, Freud’s tripartite model, Simmel’s sociology, Teilhard de Chardin’s Noosphere, and De Bono’s lateral thinking, we propose that consciousness is not a single thing that people either have or don’t — it is a spectrum of orientations, each legitimate, each coherent, each expressing a different relationship between the self, other people, and the world.
Sixteen Ways of Being Conscious
This is where the paper’s central framework — Strategic Life Force (SLF) Theory — enters.
SLF Theory maps the sixteen Jungian personality types against sixteen distinct theories of consciousness. The argument is that each type does not just have characteristic preferences and behaviours. It has a characteristic way of experiencing reality — a particular relationship between self and world, between certainty and uncertainty, between individual and collective.
A person oriented toward Information Integration as their primary consciousness theory approaches change very differently from someone whose primary orientation is Emergence or Quantum or Panpsychism. Not better or worse — differently. One asks “how does this work and what does it optimise?” The other asks “what does this mean and how does it change our relationships?”
What the data shows — drawn from over a decade of national population research — is that these differences are not random. They are structured by personality type in measurable and consistent ways. Some types are strongly predisposed toward early adoption, approaching new technologies with a sense of natural extension — the tool fits how they already process the world. Others are strongly predisposed toward caution, not from ignorance but from a genuine sense that the questions being asked of them by the technology do not align with how they experience meaning and agency.
The most important finding is not which types adopt early and which adopt late. It is that the gap between the most enthusiastic adopters and the most cautious is far larger than any demographic variable can explain — and it holds consistently across age groups, education levels, and professional contexts. Early and late adoption are personality phenomena, not demographic ones.
What This Means in Practice
The implications ripple outward in several directions.
For technology developers, SLF Theory suggests that designing for the early adopter — optimising for the analytical, systems-oriented user who moves fast and asks questions later — means building for a minority while making the majority feel the technology was not made for them. A tool that feels like a natural extension of intelligence to one personality type can feel like an intrusion on agency to another. These are not bugs in the users. They are design failures.
For organisations managing change, the framework reframes the question entirely. The person who resists a new system is not a problem to be solved with more training. They may be someone for whom meaning, community, and continuity are the primary registers of experience — and the technology, as introduced, has not spoken to any of those things. The intervention needed is not more information. It is a different kind of conversation about what the technology means, not just what it does.
For those thinking about AI specifically, the stakes are particularly high. AI systems interact with people across the full spectrum of personality and consciousness orientations. A system calibrated to one orientation — the analytical, individualist, systems-focused mode that tends to dominate AI development culture — will feel intuitive to some and alienating to others, not because those others are unsophisticated but because their way of being conscious is genuinely different.
The Self-Other Question
Underneath all of this is a deeper structural insight that the paper develops through Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Consciousness is never purely individual. It always exists in relationship — between I and We, between self and other, between the certainty of what I know and the uncertainty of what the world might ask of me next.
Every person navigating a new technology is simultaneously navigating all of these tensions. And they navigate them from a particular position — a personality-shaped orientation toward individualism or collectivism, toward uncertainty or certainty, toward the present moment or longer duration. SLF Theory maps all of these orientations together, not as a ranking but as a genuine plurality.
What emerges is a picture of technology adoption that is richer and more human than the standard adoption curve allows for. Early adopters are not simply ahead of the curve. They are people whose consciousness orientation aligns naturally with the kind of novelty and disruption that new technology represents. Late adopters are not behind. They are people who need the technology to demonstrate that it understands them — their values, their relationships, their sense of what matters — before they will extend their trust to it.
Both orientations are intelligent responses to a world in constant change. The question is whether the technologies we build are capable of meeting that full range of intelligence, or only the fraction that happens to look like its creators.
Read the Full Paper
Benjamin, C., & Bitetto, P. (2023). Theories of Consciousness and Emergent Technologies: The Impact of Personality on Approaches to Change and Choice. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 10(8), 289–306. DOI: 10.14738/assrj.108.15266