Although past research suggests that reference groups induce follow-up and imitation behavior, the mechanisms of how and when reference groups become effective drivers of herd behavior remain unclear. Using a sample of individual investors in the Chinese stock market, this study proposes and empirically tests a theoretical framework for understanding the effect of reference group type on herd behavior and the boundary conditions that limit or enhance its effectiveness. The results, based on 306 valid questionnaires, show that herd behavior resulting from peers, friends, and experts exhibits a growth trend. This trend is gradual in individual investors with low self-esteem or high trait anxiety in buying or selling behavior, or when the reference group’s prediction is consistent with the subject’s prediction. Furthermore, trait anxiety acts as a mediator in the multilevel moderating effect of self-esteem on the relationship between reference group type and herd behavior. However, multilevel mediated moderation is not significant when the subject’s prediction is inconsistent with that of the reference group. In addition, the results indicate that evaluations of others reduce or even obscure the respective and joint effects of self-esteem and trait anxiety.

The aim of this research is to obtain our knowledge about the impact of money attitude and conscientiousness toward mental budgeting and to understand the different perspective between Indonesia and China. The result was found that Indonesian people had the dimension of retention-time in money attitude and high conscientiousness while Chinese people had a positive impact on the dimension of power-spending, distrust, and conscientiousness. These results are examined in the purpose for all the parents to take good care of their children before they fall to the materialistic attitude, especially in the millennium era when the number of people who use e-money are raising.

Studies of infants’ and adults’ social cognition frequently use geometric-shape agents such as coloured squares and circles, but the influence of agent visual-form on social cognition has been little investigated. Here, although adults gave accurate explicit descriptions of interactions between geometric-shape aggressors and victims, implicit association tests for dominance and valence did not detect tendencies to encode the shapes’ social attributes on an implicit level. With regard to valence, the lack of any systematic implicit associations precludes conclusive interpretations. With regard to dominance, participants implicitly associated a yellow square as more dominant than a blue circle, even when the true relationship was the reverse of this and was correctly explicitly described by participants. Therefore, although explicit dominance judgements were strongly influenced by observed behaviour, implicit dominance associations were more clearly influenced by preconceived associations between visual form and social characteristics. This study represents a cautionary tale for those conducting experiments using geometric-shape agents.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders are known to have difficulties with visual perspective taking. This study used a left–right discrimination task to examine whether autistic traits in typically developing individuals influence visual perspective taking. In each trial, an avatar displaying one of three postures (front, back, and front with arms crossed) was displayed on a PC monitor. For each trial, the direction (left or right) and reference (subjective, objective, or others’ hand) were instructed and participants had to identify the correct side on the display. In trials with an objective reference, individuals with lower levels of autistic traits could easily project themselves onto the back view of the avatar. Individuals with higher levels of several autistic traits (e.g., attention to local detail, imagination difficulty) did not use this advantage, tending to focus body parts of the avatar as cues to discriminate directions.