Social media utilities have made it easier than ever to know
what one’s friends, family, and acquaintances are doing, buying,
and talking about. In many ways these social affordances are positive,
highlighting opportunities and connecting people. However,
because time is limited, this means people must also miss out on
a substantial subset of potentially rewarding experiences made
salient by social media use. This double-edged quality of social
media has driven popular interest in and increased speculation
about the nature of fear of missing out. Although little is empirically
known about fear of missing out at this stage, the present research
provides a number of insights into how fear of missing out
can be reliably assessed and how it constellates with motivational,
behavioral , well-being, and demographic factors.
In the first study we recruited a large and diverse sample of participants
who rated a pool of items drafted to reflect individua l differences
in fear of missing out. Guided by our considerati on of the
extant writings about the phenomenon we pursued an empirically
rigorous and data-driven approach to create a self-report measure .
As a result of strategic item selection and testing we identified ten
items that form a new psychometric instrument to tap into individual
differences in FoMO. This first of its kind assessment, the FoMOs,
is a brief and easy to administer assessment that is sensitive
and quantifies FoMO for those who evince low, moderate, and high
levels of the fear of missing out construct.
In the second study we collected a larger, nationally representative
sample and investigated fear of missing out against the backdrop
of SDT, a macro theory of human motivation and extant
research exploring motives for social media use. Our goal was to
investigate demographic variability in FoMO as well as to understand
its links to motivational and well-being factors. Results indicated
that the young, and young males in particular, tended
towards higher levels of FoMO. This pair of findings conceptually
replicated and lends empirical weight to earlier industry reports
(JWT, 2011, 2012 ) that suggested FoMO tends to be a phenomenon
grappled with by younger people.