Abstract
The aim of this study was to investigate the use and poten-tial of the psychological theory of human-behavior modeling, called the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), in a user-modeling domain. We per-formed a user experiment involving a well-studied problem of user mod-eling, i.e., a recommender system (RS) for movies. As a part of the TPB, a survey to estimate the behavioral, normative and control beliefs regard-ing movie selection was designed. Using the participants’ responses an Ajzen model for movie genres was built and evaluated. An existing pub-lic dataset for context-aware movie recommendation, CoMoDa, was used to evaluate the proposed method. The results showed that the TPB ap-proach led to an interesting explanation of movie genre selection. Among others, the potential applications of the TPB in recommender systems and the architecture of such a RS were addressed. Questions about the potential applications of the TPB in the user-modeling domain and its limitations and drawbacks were discussed.