Teacher-student empathic relationship shaping: an elimination mechanism for psychological segmentations in entrepreneurship education.

Objective: From the perspective of empathy theory, this study focuses on the process of entrepreneurship education to explore the mechanism between teacher-student empathic relationship and psychological connection.

Background: Entrepreneurship education aims to provide talent to support the innovative development of society. Previous studies have focused on the educational significance of the promoting entrepreneurial intention, and few have paid attention to the psychological differentiation caused by the incomprehension between teachers and students.

Method: By conducting three experiments on cognitive empathy shaping to eliminate confidence segmentation, affective empathy shaping to eliminate confidence segmentation, and the non-negligible affective bias, a total of 424 college undergraduates were invited to participate in this study (405 final valid samples were collected). This study analyzed the impact of cognitive empathy, affective empathy and affective bias on confidence segmentations in entrepreneurship, within the theoretical framework of empathy, as well as the moderating role of objective environmental perception.

Results: Cognitive empathy and affective empathy has significant positive effects on the entrepreneurial confidence segmentation between teachers and students, while affective bias plays its role to aggravate the entrepreneurial confidence segmentation. On this basis, objective factors such as individual conditions and supporting environment serve as important moderators, and the significance of rational relationship is higher than that of perceptual relationship.

Conclusions: This study indicates that the teacher-student empathic relationship in entrepreneurship education is a dual-process mechanism of connection, and that the rational relationship is more vital than the emotional one. We confirm the psychological significance of teacher-student empathic relationship in entrepreneurship education, and demonstrate the framework of empathy theory in a new context.