The Influence Of Counterfactual Thinking On Entrepreneurial Opportunity Recognition

As a meaningful social activity,entrepreneurship can increase the social employent rate and broaden employment channels,and ease the pressure of employment.Entrepreneurship opportunity recognition is the beginning and premise of entrepreneurship.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct research on the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities.Recently,mainstream researches have begun to concentrate on entrepreneurial cognition,making clear entrepreneurial behavior by exploring the cognitive causes behind entrepreneurial behavior.Since entrepreneurs' cognitive models are usually related to the success or failure of their own behaviors,and counterfactual thinking is based on a psychological simulation in the context of success or failure,counterfactual thinking is the most common way of thinking in the entrepreneurial process,which is an important means of analyzing cognitive schema and explaining entrepreneurial actions,then it will play an important role in the discovery and recognition of entrepreneurial opportunities by entrepreneurs.By studying the impact of counterfactual thinking on the recognition of entrepreneurial opportunities,we find that entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays a conductive role between the both.In addition,research shows the uniqueness of entrepreneurial context induces cognitive processes related to entrepreneurial activities,and the social context in which entrepreneurs are located has an impact on individual cognition,so social networks are included in the research framework of this paper.This paper takes the entrepreneur as the investigation object,combines the predecessors' research on counterfactual thinking,entrepreneurial opportunity recognition,entrepreneurial self-efficacy and social network.Based on the ternary interaction theory and self-efficacy theory,this paper constructs the model,puts forward the research hypothesis,adopts the statistical application software SPSS 20.0 and AMOS 17.0 and analysis the questionnaires of 224 entrepreneurs.The conclusions of the study indicate that:(1)entrepreneurial counterfactual thinking is positively related to entrepreneurial opportunity recognition;(2)entrepreneurial self-efficacy has a moderating role in entrepreneurial counterfactual thinking and entrepreneurial opportunity identification;(3)Social network has a positive mediator between entrepreneurial counterfactual thinking and entrepreneurial self-efficacy.On the one hand,the research results of this paper enrich the entrepreneurial cognition theory with “ situation-think-behavior ” as the research framework,supplementing the research on counterfactual thinking,entrepreneurial opportunity identification,entrepreneurial self-efficacy and social network.On the other hand,it enriches the research on entrepreneurial practice of cognitive perspective.In entrepreneurial practice,individuals can reasonably use counterfactual thinking to improve their ability to identify entrepreneurial opportunities,maintain a stable sense of self-efficacy and build a geart social network to increase self-efficacy to reserve knowledge for future identification of entrepreneurial opportunities.