TAM or VFM? Which Model Matches How People Ascribe Actually Value?

The IT community has a long history of developing theory to explain when people will change their behaviors to adopt new technology systems. Two current technology adoption theories, the Technology Adoption Model and the Value Frequency Model, draw from different groups of referent theory: Reasons Theories (RTs) and Expectancy Value Theories (EVTs). RTs and EVTs make different assumptions about how people form attitudes toward behavioral changes (i.e., to adopt or not). Having a better understanding of how people make judgments that affect their behavioral choices could help guide the choice of referent theory when developing new IT theory. This study examined how people responded to attitude-shaping scenarios as a way to gain insight into the assumptions that could be guiding their choices. Their responses indicated a tendency to assign values in ways consistent with the assumptions and processes articulated in EVTs.