Integrating Big Five Personality Theory and Self-Determination Theory: A Conceptual Framework for FOMO and False News Sharing on Social Media

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_142How to use a DOI?

Keywords

big five personality; self-determination theory; fear of missing out; self-esteem; false news sharing; social media behavior

Abstract

The spread of false news on social media has become a complex psychological and communicative phenomenon that cannot be fully explained by technical or algorithmic factors alone. Although previous studies have examined personality traits, social media motivations, and misinformation sharing, these factors have often been investigated separately. This conceptual paper proposes an integrated framework combining Big Five Personality Theory and Self-Determination Theory (SDT) to explain why individuals engage in unverified information sharing on social media. The framework argues that personality traits influence users’ satisfaction or frustration of basic psychological needs, including autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When these needs are frustrated, users may experience Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), which increases impulsive and socially motivated false news sharing. Furthermore, self-esteem is proposed as a moderating psychological resource that buffers the effect of FOMO on false news sharing. By linking personality, motivation, emotion, and behavior, this paper develops a Personality–Motivation–Emotion framework and provides theoretical implications for understanding user-driven misinformation diffusion.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hong Yu
AU  - Mumtaz Aini Binti Alivi
AU  - Linkai Wu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/07
TI  - Integrating Big Five Personality Theory and Self-Determination Theory: A Conceptual Framework for FOMO and False News Sharing on Social Media
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 12th International Conference on Digital Humanities and Frontiers in Social Sciences (DHFSS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1330
EP  - 1337
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_142
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_142
ID  - Yu2026
ER  -