Fear of Missing Out

Fear of Missing Out

Fear of missing out is the anxiety that an absent self is missing a rewarding experience others are having. The term is older than its famous coinage: Dan Herman published it in 2000, and a 2004 student newspaper column popularised the acronym. The research construct arrived later, with Andrew Przybylski and colleagues in 2013, who defined it, built the scale and grounded it in self-determination theory. The scale correlates reliably with heavier social media use and with lower satisfaction of basic psychological needs. The evidence is overwhelmingly cross-sectional self-report and the causal direction is unresolved.

What it is

Przybylski, Kou Murayama, Cody DeHaan and Valerie Gladwell define the construct as a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, together with the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing. Their grounding is in self-determination theory: the distress is what unmet relatedness feels like when the evidence of other people's connectedness is constantly visible.

That grounding matters because it credits Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, and popular accounts of the construct regularly reach for self-determination theory without naming them.

This publication's own working model of the commercial version has three forces and is a framework rather than a tested finding. Visibility: you can see what you are missing. Exclusivity: you cannot easily get back in. Momentum: it is happening now. Remove any one and the effect collapses. Combine all three and a room sells out in hours.

One claim that circulates should be handled carefully. A widely quoted line holds that there is no agreed academic definition of the construct, which was fair when the concept was being used loosely by marketers and is no longer the state of the literature. There is a standard research definition and a standard scale, and they are Przybylski and colleagues'.

In effect

Commercially, it is the scarcity principle in event-shaped form. A founder-only dinner with thirty seats and a public guest list sells out faster than a hundred-seat dinner with the same speakers and an open invitation, at a higher price. What is being sold is not the dinner. It is the not-being-at-it. The same structure powers concert presales, luxury waiting lists, club doors and limited-cohort online communities: the visibility is the product and the exclusion is the price tag.

In product design it operates as an internal trigger, which is the uncomfortable part. A product reached for when a person feels this way has a commercial interest in the feeling persisting, and the design consequence follows without anyone needing to intend it.

There is a competing account of the compulsion worth keeping on the page. Tim Wu locates the pull of habitual checking in the reward schedule rather than in social anxiety: the payoff is unpredictable, which is why an inbox full of nothing still gets checked. Those two explanations are not mutually exclusive and they make different predictions about what would stop the behaviour.

And there is a good demonstration that removing the device does not remove the anxiety. Nir Eyal reports his own case: having moved his phone out of the bedroom, he substituted his laptop when anxious about missing something, which is his own distinction between root and proximate cause catching him out.

What it does not say

It does not say that social media causes the anxiety. The correlations are real and the studies are cross-sectional, so heavier use may produce the feeling, the feeling may produce heavier use, or a third factor may produce both.

It does not lack a definition. The standard research definition and scale exist and should be used rather than the marketing-report versions.

It does not belong to the person usually credited with it. The acronym's populariser wrote in 2004; the term appears in the branding literature in 2000.

It does not have coefficients behind the personality profile often attached to it. Links to neuroticism and narcissism are asserted in popular accounts with nobody named and no figures given.

And the three-force model on this page is this publication's own framework for the commercial case. It is not a tested finding and should not be presented as one.

Sources

  1. Herman, D. (2000). Journal of Brand Management. The first published use of the term, per the author's own account. Read from secondary sources.
  2. 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, 29(4), 1841-1848. The research definition, the scale and the grounding in self-determination theory, crediting Deci and Ryan. Read from secondary sources.
  3. Furnham, A. The New Psychology, ch. 18. Names an advertising agency's trend report as the source of the working definition and states there is no agreed academic definition, which the 2013 paper supersedes. Names nobody for the neuroticism and narcissism links and gives no coefficients.
  4. Wu, T. (2016). The Attention Merchants. Knopf. The reward-schedule account of habitual checking, pp. 186-188.
  5. Eyal, N. (2014). Hooked. Portfolio. pp. 48-49, on this feeling as an internal trigger. And Indistractable (2019), ch. 35, for the laptop substitution case.
  6. Verified in the vault on 2026-09-25 from secondary sources. The three-force model and the dinner example are this publication's framework, not a tested finding.