How Much FOMO Do You Have?
The fear, the checking, and the evening you were not actually at
The fear of missing out got its name from the internet and its measurement from psychology, in 2013, when researchers built a scale for it and found something that reframes the whole thing. It was not driven by how social a person was. It was driven by unmet needs - for competence, for autonomy, for feeling connected - and it predicted checking behaviour, low mood, and the peculiar experience of being somewhere while attending to somewhere else. The fear is real; what it points at is usually not the party.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about an ordinary week. The first five questions are close to the original scale; the rest ask what the fear does to you.
What it measures
The fear itself, as the original scale measures it; the checking it drives, which is the behaviour the researchers found it predicts; and the cost, which is the part of you that is not where your body is. The first is the trait; the other two are what it does.
Based on: Fear of Missing Out scale (Przybylski et al., 2013)
Possible results
The fear
That others are having the better time, somewhere else.
The checking
Staying plugged in so as not to miss it.
The cost
Being somewhere while attending to somewhere else.
Common questions
Is FOMO just being sociable?
No, and that was the most useful finding in the original study. Sociable people want to be with others; people with high FOMO fear being without them, and the two behave differently - the first goes to the thing, the second checks on it from the sofa. What predicted the fear was not extraversion but unmet needs for competence, autonomy and connection, which is why the same person can have very little of it in one year and a great deal in a year when something else has gone missing.
What actually reduces it?
Not attending more things, which people try first and which does not touch the fear. The study points at the needs underneath - doing something you are competent at, having some say over your own week, and one or two real connections rather than a feed of hundreds. And for the checking specifically, the loop breaks by removing the option at set times rather than resisting it: the urge to look peaks and drops within minutes if it is not fed, and each time it drops the next one is weaker.
Sources
- Przybylski, A. K., Murayama, K., DeHaan, C. R., & Gladwell, V. (2013). Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out. Computers in Human Behavior.
An honest note The original scale measures the fear as a single thing, and the first bar is the part adapted from it. The other two are not part of that scale: they follow the study's own findings about what the fear predicts - social media engagement and being distracted from the present - and are separated out because they are where the practical cost sits. Two limits. The research is correlational and the direction is not settled: unmet needs may drive the fear, or the fear and the checking may leave needs unmet, and the honest reading is that both run. And the scale was built with young adults in 2013, before the platforms that now supply most of the material; the fear has not changed but its fuel has, and a result here describes your relationship with it rather than measuring a fixed trait.
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