How do people think? By understanding how people think, we can do a better job of explaining their actions. Both of us (the authors) were drawn to this topic in the extreme context of entrepreneurship. This context is extreme because the actions associated with entrepreneurship can have a substantial impact on the individual taking the actions, the economy, com-munities, the environment, and so…
Existing entrepreneurial cognition studies have primarily focusedon top-down processes for allocating attention to notice and inter-pret environmental-change signals of potential opportunities. Top-downprocesses rely on existing knowledge structures to direct entrepreneurialattention. Entrepreneurs use their knowledge structures to deductivelyinteract with the environment to notice, interpret, …