Talking in Circles, Thinking in Teams: Interdisciplinary Collaboration on Wicked Problems

Abstract

Interdisciplinary teams are increasingly tasked with solving complex, ill-defined problems, yet the real-time processes underlying their success remain understudied behaviorally. This thesis develops and pilots a paradigm for observing interdisciplinary team process on a bounded wicked problem, combining a novel sustainability task (Project CLEARPATH), a discussion quality rubric, and a transcript-derived analytical pipeline. Seven epistemically diverse triads of Princeton undergraduates were assigned to one of four conditions crossing role assignment and discussion scaffolding. The rubric achieved good composite reliability, and the task elicited genuinely distinct epistemic approaches across teams. Exploratory analyses revealed that discussion quality only weakly predicted written output quality, that the two interventions appear to operate at different phases of the collaborative cycle, and that teams self-organized rapidly into qualitatively distinct interaction profiles. The paradigm is offered as reusable infrastructure for confirmatory research on interdisciplinary team process under uncertainty.