Ajzen and Fishbein History

There was a movement to develop unidimensional scales - Likert.
This was used to measure all sorts of attitudes - war, blacks, birth control...
They seemed to offer a direct link between attitude and bahaviour.

Richard Lapiere (1934) did a breakthrough work with Chinese in US. Showed little link between attitudes and behaviours. Big discrepancy. Through all previous work into doubt.

From there various authors began to break down attitude into three parts
cognition (beliefs)
affect (feelings)
conation (actions)

However, even when they did break it down - there was still a strong link between attitude and behaviour, but does not explain why the link is sometimes weak.

The three pronged approach did not seem to bear fruit.

Consistency Theories

The idea that people search for consistency between their beliefs, attitudes and behaviour.

The most interesting thing however, was Festigers theory of cognitive dissonance. How people can sometimes not bring these things into equilibrium, or act in ways incongruent with their beliefs.

Recent developments

Due to the lack solid empirical work between attitude and behaviour the latest focus (1970) has been on "other variables"