Examining Psychological Mediators in Entrepreneurship: Experimental Designs, Remedies, and Recommendations

Psychological mediators underlie many entrepreneurship phenomena. Unfolding psychological mechanisms enhances our understanding of theoretical relationships in entrepreneurship. This paper first reviews the current state of entrepreneurship studies examining psychological mediators and identifies the hurdles that push researchers away from employing randomized experiments to unfold the causal relationships underlying mediation. To alleviate these hurdles, we then propose parsimonious yet rigorous experimental designs that make experiments testing psychological mediators in entrepreneurship feasible and cost efficient. In addition, when manipulating the mediator is not feasible, we theorize and identify two remedies a single experiment can use to examine the causal chain underlying mediation.