Psychological Constructs toward Agricultural Technology Adoption: Evidence from Eastern India

Abstract

We apply the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to identify farmers’ psychological constructs toward agricultural technology in three dimensions: attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control. We use data from 731 farmers in Eastern India. The sample farmers come from two groups: 157 farmers who have received seed mini-kits of a new stress-tolerant rice variety, called Swarna Sub 1, from NGOs; and 574 farmers who were randomly selected in the villages where the mini-kits were distributed. In this paper, we find that the mini-kit recipient farmers have higher scores on psychological constructs toward new technologies than the representative farmers. We also find that scheduled caste, female, and less educated farmers have lower scores on the psychological constructs. Among representative farmers, we estimate an adoption model of Swarna Sub 1 and find that psychological constructs are positively associated with the adoption of Swarna Sub 1. Although the causality between the psychological constructs and the adoption of Swarna Sub 1 is indecisive in this paper, the result indicates the importance of investigating farmers’ psychological constructs in technology adoption in developing countries.