How Fear of “Looming Megacatastrophes” Alters Entrepreneurial Activity Rates through Psychological Distance

Abstract

Currently, the global mood is one of anxiety and fear over “looming megacatastrophes” (LMCs) such as climate change, pandemics, or nuclear war. The important implications of these proliferating fears in the broader public notwithstanding, we concern ourselves with how this widespread and growing fear of “impending doom”—which we refer to as “Big F” Fear—relates to entrepreneurial activity. While a host of fears (e.g. fears of failure, rejection) have been explored theoretically and empirically in the entrepreneurship literature, the dominant approach to examining fear has mostly been individual and situation specific across a limited time frame—i.e., “little f” fears. We aim to explore whether entrepreneurship works the same way in the context of “Big F” Fear (i.e. the fear of “impending doom” that exists across large populations simultaneously, over an extended period of time) as it does under normal conditions. In doing so, we draw on construal level theory to explain how entrepreneurs’ perceptions of their psychological distance to the effects of a LMC relate to affective (i.e., Fear) and behavioral (i.e., entrepreneurial activity) outcomes.