BIO
Icek Ajzen (Chelm, Poland) obtained his PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (United States) in 1969. Two years later he was appointed Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has spent most of his research career, alternating his work there with a series of visiting and other positions at Tel Aviv University. Currently Professor Emeritus at UMass Amherst, he has also headed its Division of Personality and Social Psychology on three separate occasions (1980-85, 1997-99 and 2001-12). Considered the researcher with the highest impact publications in the social psychology field (more than 530,000 citations), his most influential books are Attitudes, Personality, and Behavior (2005); Prediction and Change of Health Behavior: Applying the Reasoned Action Approach (2007), with Dolores Albarracín and Robert Hornik; and Predicting and Changing Behavior: The Reasoned Action Approach, with Martin Fishbein (2010).
CONTRIBUTION
Attitudes that explain behavior and provide clues on how to change it
Attitude theory, as the citation remarks, has proved highly influential across a large tract of the social sciences, precisely because of the relationship between attitude and behavior. Icek Ajzen, Professor of Social Psychology, Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, elaborated on this relationship, with the late Martin Fishbein, in one of social psychology’s most celebrated models for explaining and predicting human behavior: the theory of planned behavior (TPB). This theory, says the committee, “explains how behavior is influenced by attitudes, perceived social pressure, and the difficulty of performing the behavior.”
Ajzen proposed this model in 1985 in a chapter of the book Action Control: From Cognition to Behavior and later developed it in a seminal 1991 paper published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. The TPB postulates that a person’s behavior is based on their intention, which rests in turn on three fundamental factors: their attitude towards the behavior in question (positive or negative evaluation towards performing the action); subjective norms (perceived social pressure to act in a given way, based on beliefs about the expectations of family members, friends and society in general); and perceived control of the behavior or self-sufficiency (that is, the individual’s perception of the ease or difficulty of performing the action, according to the resources, abilities and opportunities at their command).
“In my model,” says Ajzen, “attitudes are one of the three prongs that determine behavior, alongside social influence and the means that a person has to carry it out. The weight of each factor depends on the behavior you’re dealing with and the context.” It has been found, for instance, that in advanced societies like the United States the chance of a person getting vaccinated against a pandemic like COVID 19 “will depend essentially on their personal attitude to that behavior, based on whether they think it is worth getting the jab.” In African countries, conversely, “what counts most is the difficulty. It’s more a question of control, of getting access to the vaccine.”
Ajzen is proud to state that his model has been applied in over 2,000 research projects in the past forty years, and “has shown proven utility in identifying key behavioral factors, and thus developing strategies to modify behavior, in a wide variety of fields with multiple applications.” These run from public health (the promotion of vaccination, the use of condoms to prevent AIDS or the practice of physical activity) to the environment (for example, how to encourage use of public transportation over private vehicles by facilitating citizens’ access to subway or bus lines). “I guess what I’m most proud of is that I developed a model and accompanying methodology that people find useful in their work, no matter what kind of work they do and what kind of behavior they’re interested in. And in fact, it has been applied now quite frequently in behavior change interventions.”
