Don’t Fear Missing Out

Liad Weiss’ research shows worrying might not be rational, but it could be helpful

It happens all the time—you check Facebook and see friends enjoying a Badgers’ bowl game without you because you have to work. Then a different game gets scheduled on the night you have concert tickets. That “fear of missing out” (FOMO) makes you question your choices time and time again. But let’s say that due to a work commitment on the evening of the concert you miss out on both the game AND the concert. Why does that feel worse than just missing the game? You couldn’t have done both those things at the same time anyway, so why do you feel like you missed out on so much?

Liad Weiss, an assistant professor of marketing, researches the psychology behind consumer choice. Through his work, he finds that people’s choices sometimes don’t follow a purely rational or economic logic, but being aware of how and why consumers make choices can benefit marketers and consumers alike.

WSB: How does your research go beyond simply identifying a “fear of missing out” to explore its impact?

LW: In our research we ask how feelings of loss (or “opportunity cost”) associated with FOMO might drive us to change our behavior: When might we put more effort into making sure we don’t miss out? This is a question that has implications for marketers, consumers, and policymakers.

We found situations in which we associate a failure to act with an inappropriately large loss, leading our fear of missing out to get irrationally stronger. In other words, we overestimate the opportunity cost, producing a cognitive bias—a kind of blind spot—that leads us to pursue our plans more vigorously.

WSB: So it’s not all bad?

LW: Exactly. FOMO may make us feel frustrated and dissatisfied with life choices, but our research shows that it may also inspire us to seek out and take advantage of more opportunities.

WSB: Is your mind playing a trick on you?

LW: As humans, we have all these heuristics, or shortcuts, by which we operate, and they are oftentimes useful; life is complicated and we don’t want to make all the calculations every time we make a choice. But sometimes these shortcuts play tricks on us. That’s where my research comes in—I like to understand what leads us to make choices that seem illogical.

WSB: What was the inspiration for this research?

LW: It’s a funny story. I was a first-year PhD student at Columbia, and my cubicle mate was telling me how every Monday at 9 a.m. he had a lecture at Columbia and another class at the same time at NYU. Every Sunday night he’d set multiple alarm clocks because he was afraid if he didn’t wake up he’d miss both classes. I’d say, “You can’t miss both, you can only go to one of them!” His behavior was illogical, since it was based on a misperception that he could miss out on more than the one class that he could actually attend. He was overestimating the opportunity cost of sleeping in! This was interesting to me because economists tell us that people tend to underestimate opportunity cost, but his behavior showed the opposite.

WSB: Was yours the first research that identified that people sometimes overestimate their opportunity cost?

LW: Yes. That’s a unique aspect of it because the idea up until then was that we tend to underestimate the cost of our missed opportunities. Our research shows that the opposite happens when multiple conflicting opportunities (for example, a bowl game and a concert on the same evening) are available for us. This insight seems especially relevant for our age of social media. As users, we regularly receive updates about different events taking place right now. Our research suggests that rather than realistically realizing that we can actually attend only one event at any one time, we erroneously think that we could have had it all, and therefore mistakenly behave as if by staying home we in fact miss it all.

WSB: How do students react to learning about these kinds of research outcomes?

LW: It’s a challenge because students are consumers, so they think they can predict what consumers will do. I’ll describe different situations and ask, “What do you think will happen here?” Students share their predictions, and they’ll often be wrong. The idea is to help students realize that it’s not easy to understand consumers because we are all biased. This is why we need research data.

WSB: Do you see that light-bulb moment in your students when they understand?

LW: Yes, and it’s nice. I think the research provides some really cool insights for students. Sometimes I’ll get an email that says, “I just landed my dream job in New York after I told them in my interview about what we’d learned in class and they thought that was so insightful.” That’s a later effect of that light-bulb moment, and it’s really gratifying when that happens.