Martin Fishbein's Legacy: The Reasoned Action Approach

The reasoned action approach that Martin Fishbein pioneered has emerged as the dominant conceptual framework for predicting, explaining, and changing human social behavior. The most popular model in this tradition, the theory of planned behavior, has generated a great deal of empirical research supporting the premises of this approach. It has been shown that behavioral, normative, and control beliefs provide the basis, respectively, for attitudes toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control; that these three factors jointly account for a great deal of variance in behavioral intentions; and that intentions and perceived control can be used to predict actual behavior. Based on these insights, investigators have been able to design effective behavior change interventions.