Time to retire the theory of planned behaviour? A commentary on Sniehotta, Presseau and Araújo-Soares

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Notes

1. Note that this made choosing my own title immeasurably easier.

2. Note that the word ‘comfortable’ hardly begins to do justice to the level of investment in the standard model. The Large Hadron Collider was built as a direct result of commitment to the standard model, at a cost of approximately 3 billion Euros (CERN, 2009).

3. Note that studies that test additional variables never try to test them against the corresponding beliefs. For example, anticipated regret can be operationalised as a behavioural belief (e.g., ‘doing x would make me feel regret … likely/unlikely’ × ‘feeling regret would be … bad/good’) or a control belief (e.g., ‘how often do you regret doing x? … never-frequently’ × ‘feeling regret makes my doing x less likely/more likely’). It could further be argued that expectancy value-type beliefs that make up the theory of planned behaviour constitute reflective counterparts to the more reactive attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control components.

4. Note that beyond Ajzen and Fishbein's (1980) work, there are other theory-based means by which theory of planned behaviour variables can be changed (e.g., mental simulations of process versus outcome, see Armitage & Reidy, 2008).