Dr. Martin Fishbein, 73, a hugely influential social psychologist, died of a heart attack on November 27 in London, at the Royal Free Hampstead Hospital. Dr. Fishbein was the Director of the Health Communication Program in the Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Fishbein studied the role of attitudes and social norms to understand why people engage in certain behaviors, and co-developed the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), with Icek Ajzen. It derived from previous research that started out as the theory of attitude, which led to the study of attitude and behavior. Ajzen later revised and extended TRA into the Theory of Planned Behavior.

Many of us have also used another extension of TRA, The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) -- an information systems theory that models how users accept and use a technology.

Dr. Fishbein had been at UPenn since 1997. He was active with AIDS prevention, the author of seven books and contributed more than 250 articles and chapters to professional books and journals.

Any comments or recollections of Dr. Martin Fishbein and his work? Have you used TRA or TAM in your research?