GAMBLING OR WAGING WAR WITH THE STOCK MARKET? AN INTEGRATED FIELD AND MEDIA STUDY ON SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS, METAPHORS AND INVESTMENT PRACTICES AMONG EUROPEAN AND CHINESE INVESTORS AND FINANCIAL ADVISORS

The contribution presents some results from the first empirical research program on “Social representations of the stock market in financial advisors, investors and media”, which investigates this important phenomenon (from the interdisciplinary optic of the social psychology perspective, integrating mass, group and individual dimensions, and of the financial and economic viewpoint) in two geo-cultural continents and contexts where the stock market has been differently anchored: Europe (including three different countries: Italy, UK and France with relatively well developed financial institutions) and Asia (China) a financial market with tremendous growth and development in the two past decades. The majority of studies concerning stock market psychology are characterised by behavioural finance (see for example studies on biases in markets) or by experimental economics (implying the use of laboratory experiments to test propositions derived from economics and game theory). The literature produced in these research fields is usually entirely unrelated to social representations theory. Although some rare socio-psychological studies on the stock market refer to the theory of social representations – for example, Oberlechner (2004) investigated the social representations of decision makers involved in the stock market by using metaphor analysis, or Smith (1999, 2007), which drew a remarkable picture of how market behaviour is inherently more human than technical – they are not yet cross-cultural comprehensive field and media studies integrating qualitative and quantitative methods and carried out both on special target groups like professionals financial traders , investors and different media. Our research program was specifically designed within the “modelling” paradigmatic approach (de Rosa, 2013, 2014) to the social representations theory (Moscovici, 2000) in order to furnish a multi-theoretical and multi-constructs interpretation of sociopsychological reality related to economic and financial phenomena: in particular the social psychology of the stock market in the period of the global financial-economic crisis, based on the articulation of multiple constructs, including: shared knowledge, concepts, metaphors, beliefs, attitudes, social practices and communication.