FoMO scale results: what to do with friends instead of scrolling

“I get anxious when I don’t know what my friends are up to.”

That is item 4 of 10 on the Fear of Missing Out scale, and it is not a paraphrase. Item 7 reads “It bothers me when I miss an opportunity to meet up with friends.” Item 10 is the one that stings in July: “When I go on vacation, I continue to keep tabs on what my friends are doing.” You answer each on a five-point scale from “not at all true of me” to “extremely true of me,” average the ten numbers, and you have a score for something that until 2013 had been mostly a magazine word.

The scale comes from Andrew Przybylski of the University of Essex, Kou Murayama of UCLA, Cody DeHaan of the University of Rochester and Valerie Gladwell of Essex. Their paper, “Motivational, emotional, and behavioral correlates of fear of missing out,” appeared in Computers in Human Behavior 29(4), pages 1841 to 1848. It defines fear of missing out as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent,” marked by a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing. The answer to “what should I do with friends instead of scrolling?” is buried in what the three studies found about where that apprehension comes from.

How the 10 items were chosen

Study 1 drafted 32 candidate items, drawing on journalism and industry reports about FoMO, and gave them to 1,013 people (672 men, 341 women, aged 18 to 62) recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Just over 41% lived in the United States and almost 36% in India. Participants were paid $0.30. Confirmatory factor analysis cut the pool to 25 items, and item response theory cut it again to the 10 that carried the most information across low, medium and high FoMO. Reliability was good (Cronbach’s alpha of .87), and scores computed by simple averaging correlated .95 with the more complex latent scores.

Read the finished list and a pattern shows. Six of the ten items name friends explicitly. Others concern keeping up with what is going on (item 6), and one is about sharing your own good time online (item 8). The scale mostly measures a worry about friends having a good time without you, and only secondarily a worry about missing news.

What three studies found

Study	Sample	Key result (as reported)
1	1,013 adults, international, online	10-item scale built; alpha .87
2	2,079 UK adults, 22 to 65, nationally representative (Harris Poll panel, September 2011)	Younger people, and younger men most of all, scored highest; less need satisfaction predicted more FoMO (beta .25); FoMO predicted social media use (beta .40)
3	87 first-year undergraduates (67 women, 20 men)	FoMO tied to Facebook use near waking and sleep (beta .41), mixed feelings about Facebook, Facebook in lectures (beta .27), phone use while driving (beta .28)

Study 2 is the center of the paper. The authors built on self-determination theory, the framework from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan which holds that psychological health rests on three needs: competence (feeling effective), autonomy (feeling you chose your actions) and relatedness (feeling close to others). People who reported less satisfaction of those needs reported more FoMO. They also reported lower general mood (beta .20) and lower life satisfaction (beta .17). In the authors’ words, FoMO can be understood as “self-regulatory limbo” arising from need deficits.

Then came the mediation result. Need satisfaction, mood and life satisfaction each predicted heavy social media use, but only through FoMO; once FoMO was in the model, the direct paths shrank to nothing. On average the indirect route accounted for about 19% of the variance in social media engagement. The measure of engagement was concrete: how many days in the past week the person used social media within 15 minutes of waking, during breakfast, lunch and dinner, and within 15 minutes of going to sleep.

Study 3 turned to students. Of the 87, 64 reported no Facebook use in lectures at all, while more than a quarter used it in class at least once in the week. Among the 62 who were regular drivers, higher FoMO went with more glancing at and texting on a phone, at lights and while moving. Those who scored high on FoMO also reported more positive and more negative feelings while on Facebook (betas .31 and .40). That ambivalence matters: people high in FoMO were not simply miserable on the platform. They were pulled toward it and uneasy there.

What the paper cannot tell you

The authors say it themselves. Every study was a one-time survey, “snapshots of individuals in time,” so no causal story is established. A second limit is that FoMO was treated as a stable trait, and the paper says plainly that it probably moves across months, weeks or even the course of a day. Study 3 is also small and mostly women. All of it is self-report, and the 2013 social media landscape is not the 2026 one.

Later researchers have also looked at FoMO as a state that comes and goes. As reported in secondary sources I could access, a 2018 study by Marina Milyavskaya and colleagues in Motivation and Emotion (42, 725 to 737) is cited for links between FoMO and stress and poor sleep; I did not read that paper, so treat the point as a pointer, not a finding.

What the needs framework suggests you do instead

Przybylski’s team tested no intervention, so everything in this section is inference from their needs framework, not a result. If low competence, autonomy and relatedness feed the apprehension, then the activities most likely to feed those needs are small, chosen, shared ones. The scale itself hints at the target: seven of its ten items are about friends or get-togethers,.

Relatedness is the obvious one, and it is easiest when the plan is cheap enough to say yes to. The list of twelve weeknight hygge plans is built on the Danish idea of a small, low-pressure evening, and its rule of thumb is a hard end time and under 15 dollars each. A plan with an edge asks less of people than “we should hang out sometime,” which matters because item 9 of the scale, “When I miss out on a planned get-together it bothers me,” only has something to bother about if a plan exists.

Autonomy shows up as a decision about what the night is for. Hangouts that drift into scrolling are often hangouts nobody chose; The writer Parker, in The Art of Gathering (2018), argues that a gathering needs a purpose beyond its category, and giving a Thursday dinner one sentence of purpose is a way to put a decision back in the evening.

Competence is the least obvious and perhaps the most underrated. Doing something a little hard together gives people a feeling of having done something. A 2015 study by Eiluned Pearce, Jacques Launay and Robin Dunbar found that group singing sped up early closeness among strangers compared with crafts and writing classes, and the pattern behind it, shared and slightly embarrassing effort, is available to any friend group with a pot, a puzzle or a microphone. That study followed adult-education classes, not friend groups, so it supports the idea only loosely.

One more cost is worth counting. People tend to predict that real conversation will be more awkward than it is; the research on that gap, covered in a post about deeper conversations on a walk, suggests the invitation is usually the hard part and the evening goes better than forecast.

The morning item nobody puts on a list

One of the five time points in Studies 2 and 3 is “within 15 minutes of waking up.” That is the moment a feed fills the gap before you have chosen anything. DontSnooze asks you to record a short video when the alarm goes off, and if you don’t, a random photo from your camera roll goes to friends you picked, which puts people rather than a timeline at the start of the day.

The cleanest reading of the 2013 paper is also the least dramatic: FoMO is a signal about unmet needs, measured here by asking about friends in nearly every other question. The scrolling follows the signal. Fixing the signal means having something with friends on the calendar that you chose and that costs little to attend.

For the experimental side, a three-week test of capped platforms found that limiting social media lowered loneliness and depression in a small student sample. Once the plan exists, small bids for connection are an easy way to answer a friend between meetups.