Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) as a Psychological Catalyst for Online Consumer Purchase Behavior

This study advances the understanding of FOMO from a peripheral emotional phenomenon to a commercially engmeered and theoretically consequential driver of online consumer behavior. The synthesis of 50 peer-reviewed studies (2023—2025) establishes that FOMO functions as a psychologically layered organism-state — converging social exclusion anxiety, identity-maintenance pressure, and hedonic urgency that systematically suppresses deliberative cognition and accelerates impulsive and compulsive purchasing across diverse platforms and demographic contexts. Flash sale mechanics, live-commerce countdowns, scarcity signals, and influencer-mediated social comparison do not independently generate purchase behavior; they operate as coordinated environmental triggers that activate and amplify FOMO's internalized motivational architecture, transforming the consumer's need for social belonging into a transactional imperative. The Stimulus-Organism-Response framework, Self-Determination Theory, and Social Comparison Theory collectively account for the pathways through which this process unfolds, though the present reuew argues that fully capturing FOMO-driven digital consumption demands integrative models that simultaneously address trait-level vulnerabilities, platform-specific affordances, and cultural moderating conditions — as evidenced by the religiosity findings of Dahmiri et al. (2023), Fitrah (2025), and Haryono (2025). The ethical dimension of these findings warrants equal scholarly weight. The reviewed literature's emerging distinction between digital persuasion and digital exploitation — articulated by Peter et al. (2025) and Mahmood et al. (2025) — is not an abstract concern but a structurally significant boundary whose negotiation will define the reputational and regulatory future of digital commerce. FOMO activation that systematically targets psychological vulnerability, facilitates compulsive buying disorder (Saibaba, 2024), or exploits low-self-control consumers through fintech mechanisms such as BNPL (Sonday et al., 2025) represents a long-term trust liability that short-term conversion gains cannot offset. Responsible digital marketing practice demands a principled distinction between surfacing genuine consumer value and engineering compulsion. Future research should prioritize longitudinal designs capable of tracing the cumulative psychological and financial consequences of repeated FOMO-driven purchases — a gap the current cross-sectional literature cannot address. Cross-cultural comparative studies extending beyond the predominantly Southeast Asian empirical base, investigation of Al-driven personalization as a FOMO amplifier, and examination of FOMO dynamics within emerging social commerce environments each represent theoretically urgent directions. As digital environments grow more psychologically sophisticated, the scholarly imperative to understand, theorize, and ethically evaluate FOMO-driven consumption will deepen — making the present study a contribution to a conversation whose significance is commensurate with the behavioral phenomena it seeks to illuminate.

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