Introducing FoMO from an evolutionary perspective

The advent of social media means people are continuously exposed to what others are doing. For some, this creates uncertainty about how they are living their lives, their status and their achievements.

The term “Fear of Missing Out” (FoMO) was introduced in 2004 and popularised in 2010 to describe this phenomenon. It is defined as a:

pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.  (Przybylski, et al., 2013)

FoMO involves two processes:

While FoMO may feel like a recent social phenomenon, humans have always experienced distress when missing out on opportunities to connect. This includes chances to connect with potential partners. Social media likely intensifies the experience, given the saturation of curated portrayals of other people’s lives.    

Davis, Albert, and Arnocky (2023) argue that FoMO originates in our evolution, triggering primal survival instincts. This is important in relation to vulnerability to crypto scams, but more on that later!

Evidence suggests that humans evolved in the context of small, nomadic hunter-gatherer communities where forming and maintaining social bonds were essential for survival and reproduction.

Being excluded from social events would have harmed early humans’ survival. Failing to participate in these events may have affected their reproductive success. Therefore, humans are evolutionarily primed to experience anxiety when social bonds are threatened or harmed, in addition to when we are purposely left out of meaningful social activities.

The adaptive function of this anxiety is to alert us to the threat. It allows us to overcome the risks to survival and reproductive success.

Like anxiety, FoMO may be a psychological adaptation that seeks to protect us from social exclusion and encourage social inclusion. Davis, Albert, and Arnocky (2023) suggest:

If so, then the expression of FoMO should orient individuals toward evolutionarily relevant social resources, such as social status, and prompt compensatory behavior to accrue those resources.

However, one may ask…

if FoMO is adaptive, why is it associated with poor mental health outcomes and problematic social media use?

Davis, Albert, and Arnocky (2023) argue that social media and, by extension, FoMO, represent an evolutionary mismatch.

Social media is believed to cause a mismatch between how our brains evolved and how we interact with modern technology. Humans evolved to thrive in small social groups, where belonging and social monitoring were important for survival. However, social media platforms exploit these natural tendencies, which can lead to negative mental health effects. In other words, social media uses our need for connection in ways that can be harmful. So, while our internal neurobiological responses to FoMO are perfectly natural, they are triggered by an unnatural (and some would argue exploitative) context. Hence the problematic psychosocial impacts.   

Whenever humans are confronted with a threat, the limbic system becomes dominant, overriding the prefrontal cortex. We have evolved this way to ensure we are primed to overcome immediate threats to our safety. This works perfectly with physical threats. However, there are times we may experience a mismatch between a modern threat scenario and our evolutionary fear responses.

For example, we are sitting in a job interview. We begin to feel anxious. Our hearts beat, and we struggle to find the words to express ourselves. This fear response is undermining our ability to be successful in the interview!

This makes perfect sense. The limbic part of our brain has taken over. We now have limited access to the language and comprehension centers of our brain, located in the cortex. In this instance, a modern threat is mismatched to our evolutionary response to fear.

As discussed above, FoMO evokes a primal fear response related to being excluded from social groups and failing to participate in social events. The threat of social exclusion triggers a primal fear because, from an evolutionary perspective, it poses a direct threat to our survival and reproductive success.

In a crypto context, scammers are effective in evoking this fear state. They convey a sense that you are at risk of being left behind by the clan, who are all jumping on board with what will be the next Bitcoin or Ethereum. Given the volatility of the crypto market, a fake sense of urgency is created. So, if you do not act now, you will be left behind while the rest of the clan moves into this new stratosphere of crypto wealth and status. Not to mention sexual partners of their choosing.