Unveiling the influence of disciplinary biases on information sampling during an interdisciplinary collaboration creative task through eye-tracking analysis

Abstract

Collaboration across different disciplines (interdisciplinary collaboration) is necessary for frame-breaking innovations. However, successfully implementing such often requires individuals to sample ideas outside their disciplinary knowledge. In the past, studies tend to show that individuals inevitably show bias in using their disciplinary knowledge due to disciplinary socialization. The current research proposes that disciplinary centrism is not inevitable and can be attenuated when participants do not perceive disciplinary values across disciplines to have incommensurable differences. In an eye-tracking experiment, I show that participants who held a high (versus low) perception of value differences across disciplinary knowledge would focus on their disciplinary information more (versus less) during the information sampling stage in a creativity task. The study provides implications on how to improve interdisciplinary collaboration and highlights how information is being selected and used in the informational processing stage during a creative task.