The effect of temporal distance on Chinese undergraduates’ entrepreneurial decision making

Previous researchers have shown that the entrepreneurial intentions and choices of freshmen and sophomores are higher than those of juniors and seniors in China. In order to explore the reasons for this phenomenon, I conducted an experiment with 126 undergraduates from 3 universities in Zhejiang Province in China to study the relationship between temporal distance and undergraduates’ entrepreneurial decision-making process. The results showed that: 1) temporal distance significantly influences undergraduates’ entrepreneurial decision making, and 2) entrepreneurial decision tasks in the distant future motivate the undergraduates’ cognition of desire for results (high construal level), resulting in a more positive decision, while the tasks in the near future motivate the cognition of feasibility for process (low construal level), resulting in a more negative decision.