This project examines how perceptions of fairness about technology policies affect frequency of cyberloafing, and what emotions students and employees experience in relation to their fairness perceptions. Much of the extant literature explores the relationship between emotions and cyberloafing behaviors in the workplace. Studies have relied on a number of theories from psychology and organizational behavior, including Organizational Justice Theory, the Ego-Depletion Model of Self Control, and Theory of Planned Behavior, among others, but this study aims to validate the perception of fairness as another possibility to explain these emotions. Cyberloafing in the classroom has had very little attention from the psychology world, and controlled experiments are incredibly difficult to erect in the natural workplace environment. This study explore fairness perceptions of both classroom and workplace technology policies in an attempt to provide more information for practical use of technology policies in a rapidly growing technological society. Participants will be given a survey of fifteen questions. They will be asked about their perception of the technology policy that they function under most often (as either an employee or as a student), how often they engage in cyberloafing, and what emotions they experience after cyberloafing. The central hypothesis is that participants who perceive the policy as unfair will engage in more cyberloafing and experience more positive emotions afterwards than do participants who perceive the policy as fair.
