The Status Quo of Research on Cyber Behavior

It is no surprise that research on cyber behavior has increasingly gained the attention of various stakeholders ranging from legislative policy makers to school administers, from teachers to parents, from mass media to communities, and from researchers to professional practitioners such as counselors, social workers, and school psychologists (Zheng, Burrow-Sanchez, Donnelly, Call, & Drew, 2010). As a social phenomenon, cyber behavior reflects human activities that go beyond time and space boundaries. As such, it represents social values, perceptions, and communication patterns different from those held by the traditional school of social behaviorism (Dietz-Uhler & Bishop-Clark, 2005; McKenna & Bargh, 2000; Spears & Lea, 1992). For example, it has been reported that introverted people become more engaged in social communication in an online environment than in a face-to-face environment, which runs counter to the traditional theory of personality that delineates introverted people as shy, non-social beings (Madell & Muncer, 2006). In another instance, it was found that people are more open to selfdisclosure in online environment than they usually are in the face-to-face environment. A case in point is the Facebook phenomenon where people self-disclose all sorts of personal information without being concerned about the consequence, that is, possible violation of their privacy by someone they don’t know (Dietz-Uhler & Bishop-Clark, 2005). Why do people act differently in cyber environment? What are the factors that promote people to act differently in cyber environment? What are the underlying constructs that explicate people’s psychological, cognitive, and motivational behaviors in cyber environment? Finally, what would the ramifications be with regard to the cyber behavior phenomenon and how they may contribute to the advancement of research in cyber behavior? The following sections offer discussions on the cyber behavior phenomenon from psychological and educational perspectives by first reviewing the existing research on cyber behavior, followed by a discussion on recent advances in the study of cyber behavior which are reflected in the collection of papers in this volume.