ABSTRACT
The goal of this paper was to examine the influence of social and cognitive factors on distributed reasoning within the context of scientific laboratory meetings. We investigated whether a social factor, status, and cognitive factors such as discussion topic and time orientation of the research influenced distributed reasoning. The impact of status on distributed reasoning was examined using 3 lab meetings in which a technician presented (low status) and 3 lab meetings in which a graduate student presented (high status). Two cognitive variables were also examined; focus of discussion topic (theory, method, findings, and conclusions) and the time orientation of the distributed reasoning (past, current and future research). Pooled (cross sectional/time series) analysis, a regression technique, was used to perform the analyses. We found that status of the presenter influenced the structure of distributed reasoning: When the presenter was of high status, the principal investigator was an important influence on distributed reasoning. In contrast, when the presenter was of low status, other lab members were more likely to contribute to distributed reasoning. Our analyses also show that distributed reasoning is not influenced by the discussion topic but appears to focus on the discussion of future research.
