What Interdisciplinary Research Can Tell Us About Reducing Polarization

This post is part of a Living Literature Review on interdisciplinarity. You can learn more about the project here.

Policymakers and researchers increasingly seek to bring experts from diverse disciplines together to respond to complex societal challenges. Scholarship on interdisciplinary collaboration documents a growing body of evidence about what it takes for researchers from very different starting points to work together productively.

This raises a question relevant to those beyond the interdisciplinary research community: could lessons about bridging disciplinary divides also offer insights for bridging other kinds of divides — in particular, today’s conversation about affective polarization, the growing dislike and distrust partisans express toward the other side?

Most research on reducing polarization draws from social psychology, especially work on contact theory and identity. The team science and sociology-of-science literatures offer a complementary lens, framing disagreement partly as a problem of epistemic and semantic translation, rather than only one of group identity. This post explores where the two literatures overlap and what each might contribute to the other.

Image: Business Insider

What does research tell us makes collaboration work across deep differences?

Scholarship on interdisciplinary teams has repeatedly found that productive collaboration does not require participants to converge on shared worldviews. Historian of science Peter Galison (1997), in his study of twentieth-century physics Image and Logic, describes the “trading zones” in which physicists, engineers, and instrument-builders coordinated on particle accelerators despite fundamentally different theoretical commitments. Rather than resolving these disagreements, they developed pidgin vocabularies — local, pragmatic, partial — that allowed them to work together on shared instruments. A working shared language, anchored in concrete shared work, was what mattered.

This insight is extended in Star and Griesemer (1989)’s widely cited study in Social Studies of Science of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, which introduced the concept of “boundary objects”: representations, artifacts, or problems that are “both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites.” Boundary objects — maps, specimens, shared questions — allow different communities to cooperate without fully agreeing on meaning. The shared problem, rather than a shared ideology, anchors collaboration.

The broader team science literature reinforces these findings. In a synthesis of research on transdisciplinary collaboration published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Stokols et al (2008) identify sustained contact, institutional support, and psychological safety among the most consistent predictors of productive integration across disciplines. Psychological safety — Edmondson (1999)’s foundational construct, defined in Administrative Science Quarterly as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” — is essential for teams tackling complex, ambiguous problems. In such environments, participants are more willing to acknowledge uncertainty, ask naïve questions across disciplines, and admit the limits of their own frameworks. Wuchty et al (2007), in an analysis of 19.9 million research papers and 2.1 million patents published in Science, further document that teams —often spanning multiple areas of expertise— now produce most high-impact knowledge across fields.

Together, these studies describe a particular model of productive disagreement: sustained time, a shared concrete problem, the gradual construction of new shared language, and a culture in which participants feel safe to expose the limits of their understanding.

What does the polarization literature tell us?

A striking feature of recent research on affective polarization is that many of its most promising interventions echo these same elements.

In a meta-analysis of 515 studies and 713 independent samples published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Pettigrew and Tropp (2006) found that intergroup contact typically reduces prejudice, with effects stronger under Allport’s optimal conditions — equal status, shared goals, cooperation, and institutional support. Field experiments have since extended this finding into polarized political contexts. Broockman and Kalla (2016), in a field experiment published in Science, found that a single approximately 10-minute non-judgmental conversation at voters’ doors substantially reduced transphobic attitudes, with effects persisting three months. In three field experiments involving 230 canvassers and 6,869 voters, published in the American Political Science Review, Kalla and Broockman (2020) found that the durable effect came specifically from conversations including the non-judgmental exchange of narratives, not from arguments alone. A further study, Kalla and Broockman (2021), in the American Journal of Political Science, isolates “perspective-getting” — listening closely to the story of someone in the outgroup — as the crucial mechanism, distinct from perspective-taking (imagining oneself in that position).

Other studies emphasize that polarization rests partly on inaccurate beliefs about what the other side thinks. Lees and Cikara (2020), across seven experiments with 4,282 participants in Nature Human Behaviour, found that partisans consistently overestimate the negativity of out-group views toward their in-group, and that correcting this misperception reduces hostile attributions. This maps onto a recurring pattern in interdisciplinary work: participants often assume more disagreement across disciplinary lines than actually exists, and that assumed distance itself becomes a barrier to collaboration.

What do these literatures share, and where do they diverge?

Can studies on interdisciplinary research inform work on polarization? Possibly. These areas of inquiry reflect important overlap: that structured cooperation on shared problems produces more traction than abstract debate over values. Both point to psychological safety and non-judgmental listening as preconditions for genuine exchange. And both suggest the goal of productive exchange across difference is rarely full agreement, but rather the construction of local, working understandings.

To apply lessons from interdisciplinary research, several limitations remain. Interdisciplinary collaboration is typically voluntary and rests on a shared meta-goal of understanding; many political encounters lack either condition. Research teams are small; polarization is population-scale. And while Levendusky (2018) , in the Journal of Politics, finds that priming a superordinate American identity (making people think of themselves first and foremost as Americans (a shared identity) rather than as members of opposing political groups (e.g., Democrat vs. Republican) can reduce affective polarization in controlled experiments, replication work points to the fragility of such effects, highlighting the distance between lab interventions and the structural forces driving political division.

This exploration suggests that lessons from team science are most applicable not to mass media environments, but to structured civic deliberation, cross-partisan coalitions working on concrete local problems, and bridge-building organizations that create something like “trading zones” for political difference.

Closing thoughts

Scholars of interdisciplinary collaboration may not have set out to address polarization, but their findings about bridging deep differences in vocabulary, method, and assumption speak to a broader set of challenges. Polarization, like disciplinary fragmentation, may be an artifact not only of identity but of the structures in which people are (or are not) brought into sustained contact around something that matters to all of them.

Further research explicitly connecting these literatures — tracing, for instance, how boundary objects might inform depolarizing civic projects, or how perspective-getting maps onto the pidgin languages Galison describes — could enrich both fields. For now, they converge on a diagnosis: the hard part of bridging difference is not usually changing minds, but building the scaffolding — time, language, shared concrete work, and psychological safety — within which minds can change.

Last updated: April 24, 2026

Do you have research, experiences, or insights to share on bridging divides — disciplinary, political, or otherwise? Reach out to me at rageorge@stanford.edu, and I would be grateful to feature this in a future post.

References

- Broockman, D., & Kalla, J. (2016). Durably reducing transphobia: A field experiment on door-to-door canvassing. Science, 352(6282), 220–224. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aad9713

- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999

- Galison, P. (1997). Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo3710110.html

- Kalla, J. L., & Broockman, D. E. (2020). Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation: Evidence from three field experiments. American Political Science Review, 114(2), 410–425. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/reducing-exclusionary-attitudes-through-interpersonal-conversation-evidence-from-three-field-experiments/4AA5B97806A4CAFBAB0651F5DAD8F223

- Kalla, J. L., & Broockman, D. E. (2023). Which narrative strategies durably reduce prejudice? Evidence from field and survey experiments supporting the efficacy of perspective-getting. American Journal of Political Science, 67(1), 185–204. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12657

- Lees, J., & Cikara, M. (2020). Inaccurate group meta-perceptions drive negative out-group attributions in competitive contexts. Nature Human Behaviour, 4, 279–286. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0766-4

- Levendusky, M. S. (2018). Americans, not partisans: Can priming American national identity reduce affective polarization? The Journal of Politics, 80(1), 59–70. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/693987

- Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2006-07099-004

- Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, ‘translations’ and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030631289019003001

- Stokols, D., Misra, S., Moser, R. P., Hall, K. L., & Taylor, B. K. (2008). The ecology of team science: Understanding contextual influences on transdisciplinary collaboration. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 35(2S), S96–S115. https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(08)00420-0/abstract

- Wuchty, S., Jones, B. F., & Uzzi, B. (2007). The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge. Science, 316(5827), 1036–1039. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1136099