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Metaphor and the Social World
Vol. 4:1 (2014) ► pp.90–108

The market as a rational and responsible human being

Measuring the impact of metaphor on financial decisions

| Free University of Brussels & University of Mons

There has been growing recognition that factors other than fundamental financial information have an impact on investors’ decisions on whether or not to invest in financial products. As the accumulation of information makes it increasingly difficult to process all the data efficiently, it has been shown that the power of imagery tends to compete with that of objective technical indicators. This paper extends existing perspectives on the behavioural effect of agent metaphors and shows that the connected notions of rationality and responsibility implied by some metaphorical themes will induce investors to invest or not in specific stocks.

Keywords: investors’ judgement, imagery, rationality, information processing, human perception
Published online: 5 May 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/msw.4.1.05nic
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