The Psychology of Change
Last month, OOB headed to The Drum Live’s 2025 exclusive 48-hour content sprint, to hear from and chat with marketing leaders about their views on industry hot topics. Across back-to-back live debates, there was one word that almost always got a mention: AI. Usually followed by “change” or “uncertainty” or “agile”. With all of the hype around AI, talk of it retiring the traditional advertising model but not quite beating a human touch, and the perceived pressure to stay “agile”, it suddenly feels like the future is here. But is it really here, or is it just an illusion?
In a recent interview with Contagious, behavioural scientist Richard Sotton said:
💬 “If you think about evolutionary psychology as the driver of human nature, you realise it’s ludicrous to think anything should change in five to 10 years, because that’s just a blink of an eye in the hundreds of thousands of years we’ve been around.”
AI is everywhere. The question is: Is this buzz creating the feeling of things changing quicker than they really are? Or are businesses really already behind?
Why does change feel faster than it is? ⏩
Let’s unpack the psychological phenomena behind why change might feel faster than it is.
The Hype Cycle (Gartner) 🙌
Any new technology tends to follow a predictable curve: inflated expectations → disillusionment → gradual adoption. At the peak, people feel as though the future has already arrived, even if widespread change and mainstream adoption are still years away.
The Availability Heuristic 📱
We tend to perceive things as more imminent if we encounter them often in conversation or media. Have you seen, read, or heard a lot about AI recently? Maybe in conversation, in the news, while trawling through LinkedIn…? If AI is everywhere in your feed, your brain thinks it’s everywhere in reality.
Presentism & Recency Bias 🏆
Humans tend to assume that the present moment is unique because it’s the one we’re living through. We overestimate how much is changing now compared to much slower, invisible processes in the background.
So psychologically, the illusion of “everything changing overnight” happens because:
- Our attention is hijacked by novelty and media amplification.
- Evolution primed us to notice immediate change (survival value), but we’re poor at grasping long-term, structural timelines.
- Narratives of “the future is here” are sticky and persuasive, they make us feel like participants in history, not just observers.
Is radical change likely to happen now? 🧑🏫
If rapid change can be an illusion, how can we tell when things are actually changing? Looking back at history is a good place to start. If we zoom out over recent centuries, true “step-changes” (shifts that restructured daily life across much of the world) are relatively rare.
Some examples:
- Industrial Revolution (late 1700s–1800s): Mechanisation, steam power, urbanisation.
- Electrification (late 1800s–early 1900s): Light bulbs, factories, appliances.
- Automobiles & Mass Production (early 1900s): Changed cities, labour, transport.
- Television & Mass Media (mid-1900s): Global culture and advertising.
- The Internet (1990s): Communications, commerce, information access.
- Smartphones (2007 onward): The “always connected” era.
Each of these took to embed, even the internet took 10-15 years from mainstream adoption to rewiring culture and business. If you average it out, paradigm-shifting change tends to cluster about in modern history. In between, there are smaller but powerful advances (e.g., social media, streaming, cloud).
This one's on us.
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