Dispositional Fear of Missing Out Susceptibility: Development of a Trait-Scale

Popular culture, advertising, marketing strategies, and academia recently paid increased attention to the experience of Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). Yet, there is only scant research on its complex nature and the personality-based dispositional susceptibility fostering the FOMO experience. In the present investigation, the authors present a robust Dispositional FOMO Susceptibility (DFS) scale based on a mixed-methods approach. They show that fear of exclusion and worries about inclusion, regret anticipation, and experiential envy comprise the dispositional susceptibility for FOMO. In the subsequent preregistered studies, the authors experimentally test the predictive validity of this DFS scale in the context of Instagram content viewed by users. They demonstrate how high-DFS people report higher explicitly (self-reported) and implicitly (word fragmentation task) expressed negative and lower positive emotions after viewing social information on Instagram. Consequently, the authors provide a novel, conceptually matured, and evolved viewpoint on why consumers experience FOMO and what underlying personality traits drive the experience. They offer a survey instrument to help scholars conduct fine-grained, context-independent research on FOMO.