Do you get frustrated and angry when your WiFi connection stops working? It could be because of your personality. When digital technology stops working, people with a fear of missing out (FOMO) — the anxiety that you’re missing a social experience others might be having while you’re not online — or an internet addiction have more extreme reactions, according to a new study in Heliyon.
The researchers behind the study, psychologists Dr. Lee Hadlington and Dr. Mark Scase from De Montfort University in the UK, also show that certain personality traits directly influence people’s responses to failures in digital technology: people who were seen as being more neurotic and extroverted had more extreme reactions to failures in digital technology.
“The ‘frustration’ response is one of the things we all experience on a daily basis, so it seemed to be a logical step in our research,” said lead author Dr. Lee Hadlington. “Much of the existing research on this topic is from the 1940s — you could say that this research is the first of its kind to actually explore how individual react to failures with digital technology, and more importantly, places this in the context of the modern digital era.”
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