Shades of Grey or Black and White? How Entrepreneurs’ Use of Cognitively Complex Language Affects Investor Funding
研究了创业者使用包含细微差别和比较的认知复杂语言如何影响早期投资者融资，发现这种语言能增加投资金额，但效果递减，且精英教育背景会增强这种效应。
We examine how entrepreneurs’ use of cognitively complex language—language that involves nuance, differentiation, and comparison—influences funding decisions of early-stage investors. Our theorizing builds on the notion that individuals interpret language as a social signal and attribute another person’s language use to that person’s general dispositions. On this basis, we surmise that investors perceive an entrepreneur as more cognitively complex—that is, engaging in more nuanced and differentiated thinking—the more the entrepreneur uses cognitively complex language. Arguing that perceived cognitive complexity matches investors’ prototypical construals of entrepreneurial competence, we hypothesize a positive relationship between an entrepreneur’s use of cognitively complex language and the investment amount they receive. Drawing on our theoretical framework, we also argue that signaling cognitive complexity has a decreasing marginal effect, and that elite education functions as a credibility signal, amplifying the association between cognitively complex language and investment amount. A field study of 547 actual investment pitches and a randomized experiment with 240 professionals support our ideas. Our study introduces a more nuanced portrayal of complexity in entrepreneurial communication, accentuates the role of entrepreneurs’ signals of cognitive dispositions, and introduces the concept of cognitive complexity, and linguistic displays thereof, to entrepreneurship theory.