264 Current Psychology / Fall 2003 Current Psychology: Developmental, Learning, Personality, Social. Fall 2003, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 264–280. Implications of Goal Theories for the Theories of Reasoned Action and Planned Behaviour CHARLES ABRAHAM University of Sussex PASCHAL SHEERAN University of Sheffield This paper argues that the predictive validity of the theories of reasoned action and planned behaviour could be enhanced by considering key ideas from goal theories. In particular, goal theories highlight the importance of: (a) construing action as a process of behavioural selection designed to achieve actors’ goals, (b) assessing the extent to which people have planned how to perform action sequences implied by their goals (c) investigating goal conflict in order to understand intention-behaviour discrepancies (d) examining contextual variations in goal salience to account for the dynamics of choice, (e) using intention stability to index the prioritization of goals, and (f) analyz- ing the content of the goals underlying attitudes and intentions. Suggestions are made about self-report measures and computations that would permit greater use of these ideas in future research. I n his presidential address to the first annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, Division of Personality and Social Psychology, Allport (1947) insisted that it was “necessary” for psychologists to adopt of “the concept of ‘intention.’” Contrasting intentions with drives and instincts, he recommended that psychologists study “private worlds of desire, aspiration, and conscience” (p. 186) and acknowledge the role of longer-term goals in directing and making sense of everyday action. He proposed that current goals are best understood as the means by which longer-term goals are realized; “the specific goals we set for ourselves are almost always subsid- iary to our long range intentions. A good parent, a good neighbor, a good citizen is not good because his [sic] specific goals are acceptable but because his successive goals are ordered to a dependable and socially desirable set of values” (p. 188). In the present paper, we contend that Allport’s insights concerning the relations between longer-term goals, on the one hand, and intentions to perform specific behaviours, on the other, are overlooked by the dominant accounts of cognition-behaviour relations— the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein, 1967; 1980; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975) and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB; Ajzen, 1985; 1991). We argue that these theories should be augmented to take account of insights from goal theories and we make several suggestions about how this development might be achieved.