Does Individual Anxiety Play a Mediating Role on the Impact of Psychological Expectation of Class Mobility on Entrepreneurial Choice?

Abstract

Purpose: Under the dual backgrounds of “Chinese dream” and “Mass entrepreneurship and innovation”, can psychological expectations influence entrepreneurial activities? There is little literature on this topic. In addition, although psychological expectation can reduce the negative emotions caused by uncertain events, the expectation itself can lead to the activation of related neural circuits and the generation of individual anxiety. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, this paper divides the entrepreneurship into the economic status type, the social status type and the self-development type, and attempts to study the psychological mechanism of the psychological expectation of class mobility influencing entrepreneurial choice by constructing the mediating effect model of individual anxiety. Methods: Based on CGSS 2015 data, entrepreneurial choice was obtained through describing the working status. The individual anxiety in the questionnaire is “How often have you felt depressed or disheartened in the past four weeks?”. Psychological expectation of class mobility was calculated by subtracting the current subjective class score from the subjective class score 10 years later. Classical mediating effect models were conducted by stata 15.0. Results: The psychological expectation of class mobility can promote entrepreneurial behavior. According to sub sample study, individual anxiety plays a partial mediating effect between the psychological expectation of class mobility and economic status type entrepreneurships. No mediating effect of individual anxiety occurs for social status type and self-development type entrepreneurships. Conclusion: This study provides a psychological mechanism by which the expectation of class mobility affects entrepreneurial choice. The implications are as follows: we should firstly prevent excessive anxiety from triggering irrational entrepreneurship. Secondly, we should establish a fair social mobility mechanism to provide psychological incentives for entrepreneurial groups to flow upward through entrepreneurship. Thirdly, we undertake classification management of entrepreneurial groups and pay attention to social status type and self-development type entrepreneurial.