Individual differences in Fear of Missing Out (FoMO): Age, gender, and the Big Five personality trait domains, facets, and items

Abstract

Fear of Missing Out (FoMO), or the anxiety of missing out on exciting or interesting events happening, has received substantial attention over the past years, but its associations with age, gender, and personality are less researched. The aim of this work was to investigate these relationships. 3370 German participants completed the 10-item FoMO scale and the 45-item German Big Five Inventory in 2018. The results showed no gender differences in experiencing FoMO. Younger people had higher FoMO scores. Neuroticism domain, its facets, and items robustly positively correlated with FoMO, while Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness were negatively associated with FoMO on the domain-level (with small correlations). In addition to Neuroticism, Conscientiousness had consistent negative (yet small) links with FoMO on domain-, facet-, and item-level data. This study contributes to the field by outlining individual differences in FoMO as well as by emphasizing the need to investigate personality-outcome associations on a more detailed level.