Breaking the status-quo: How bias awareness and metacognitive engagement sequentially debias entrepreneurial decisions

The core premise of this paper is that metacognition leads to improved decision-making for entrepreneurs. This premise matters because entrepreneurs' ability to metacognitively navigate judgment plays a fundamental role in how they make decisions under uncertainty. Although the entrepreneurial cognition literature offers rich insights into cognitive biases and their consequences, it has devoted less attention to how entrepreneurs make use of, adapt to, or mitigate these biases in practice. This gap limits our understanding of how entrepreneurs cope with biased judgment, including when they maintain versus challenge the status-quo. We argue that the status-quo bias, a preference for stability over change, poses a psychological barrier to entrepreneurial decision-making. Drawing on insights from the psychological and debiasing literatures, we propose that metacognitive thinking enables entrepreneurs to reflect on and flexibly regulate their judgment strategies in the face of the status-quo bias. Using an experimental design, we show that a combined metacognitive intervention reduces entrepreneurs’ reliance on the status-quo. While prior research has suggested that interventions are often ineffective or counterproductive, our results challenge this view, and show that a short, low-cost intervention can produce meaningful debiasing effects. This contribution opens avenues for future research to examine not only how entrepreneurs overcome biases through targeted interventions.