The Status Quo Bias of Students and Reframing as an Educational Intervention towards Entrepreneurial Thinking and Change Adoption

Abstract

The purpose of this research study is to examine the status quo bias and reframing interventions among business students in an attempt to understand their role in the students’ entrepreneurial decision making, aiming eventually to find out whether we can affect students’ entrepreneurial thinking by using an educational intervention towards innovation and change adoption. Though these research topics have previously been examined separately and mostly in a non-entrepreneurial context, this research paper aims to integrate them into one laboratory experiment study in an educational context, considering business students at the university. The experimental study is conducted on a sample with more than 200 undergraduate university students in their third or fourth year of studies of the Management study program at the Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. Overall, we find that students are significantly biased towards status quo in 7 out of 18 cases, demonstrating a moderate level of status quo bias. The results from the second part of our study evidence a strong effect of the reframing intervention on overcoming the status quo bias. In any case, the research paper adds a unique practical contribution by offering an actual entrepreneurship learning approach, as an intervention towards the innovation and change adoption among students at business schools and universities.