Megan C. Good

Who they are

Good studies consumer behaviour and marketing communication. This site draws on her two papers with Hyman.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

'Fear of missing out': antecedents and influence on purchase likelihood (2020), with Hyman. The paper notes that social scientists generally treat fear of missing out as a personality trait. It reports that some emotional antecedents, such as anticipated elation and anticipated envy from other people, can boost the feeling, while others, such as comforting rationalisations, can reduce it. It argues that appeals which extol the future experiences of close friends or family members can induce a spike of the feeling.

Direct and indirect effects of fear-of-missing-out appeals on purchase likelihood (2021), with Hyman. This vignette-based experiment tested whether messages built on missing out produce a context-specific response that changes purchase intentions for a hedonic service or experience. It found that such appeals can strengthen purchase intentions by boosting anticipated elation and self-enhancement, or weaken them by boosting anticipated regret about the expense.

Key ideas

The two papers move fear of missing out from a stable trait to something an advertiser can try to trigger. The 2021 experiment is the more useful for anyone asking whether the feeling makes people spend, because it manipulated an appeal and measured what followed. Its answer cuts both ways: the same kind of message can make one person keener to buy and remind another of the cost. The outcome measured was intention to buy in a written scenario, not money spent.

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