ABSTRACT
When we interviewed scientists about their collaborative processes (Okada, et al., 1995), a computer scientist who had collaborated with a cognitive psychologist mentioned the following:
The most important benefit of participating in this interdisciplinary collaboration is that there are scientists who have a different sense of value on science. For example, when working with researchers in the same discipline, we share a common ground and a common language. We can make progress in our project very quickly without wondering about what the coresearcher meant. Now, I think that my co-researcher in this interdisciplinary project and I didn’t share that common ground when we started our project. Therefore, we could not make any progress for about one year. We could not understand what confused us… The difference of disciplines related to the differences in the sense of value on science, methodology that we use, and more concretely speaking, evaluation criteria. Those differences made me feel this interdisciplinary collaboration was very interesting! [Translated from Japanese]
We have also had similar experiences when working with computer scientists. It seemed that the computer scientists were more concerned with creating
phenomena on a computer system, while we, as psychologists, were concerned with understanding phenomena in the real world, through experimental design, hypotheses, and manipulating variables.
