How Interdisciplinary? Taking Stock of Decision-Making Research at the Intersection of Psychology and Law.

Abstract

Contemporary inquiries in psychology and law increasingly cross disciplinary boundaries for inspiration. Our focus is on whether such research is substantive in both directions and whether interdisciplinary psychology-and-law author teams produce more meaningful interdisciplinary work, specifically in decision-making research conducted between 2004 and 2017. We found that interdisciplinary psychology-and-law author teams (a) produce publications that show more cross-disciplinary integration in methods than single-discipline teams, (b) produce publications with more conceptual integration in the introduction and discussion than only law author teams, and (c) elicit more citations than only law or only psychology author teams. When considering a collaborative team approach, we suggest that the disciplinary background of the collaborators is a meaningful indicator of the type of interdisciplinary research to be conducted. We also suggest that it would be beneficial for both psychology and law journals to be more open to publishing scholarship from mixed disciplinary teams.