research on researchers

an anthropologist at Princeton is studying the differences among researchers from different disciplines, such as cultural anthropology and experimenal psychology. with the increase in interdisciplinary research, this is an important topic. the article doesn't give much in the way of 'results', but it mentions that these two fields are ripe for inter-departmental tension because of different methods of research: psychology looks at pseudonatural behavior in contrived environments with few variables, whereas anthropology looks at natural behavior in natural environments with many variables.

i've actually wondered about this myself: natural scientists seem to think and interact in ways that are often consistent within disciplines, such as geneticists behaving as other geneticists. is this nature (people who act this way tend to end up in genetics) or nurture (people who go into genetics end up trained to act this way)? a study of the interactions among researchers of different natural science fields on interdisciplinary projects (especially those in neuroscience, which sees some of the strangest collaborations, from psychologists to physicists) would definitely yield some interesting results about perceived institutional hierarchies within the natural sciences, and how they're played out in professional interactions. actually, i suppose we all know the results already: physicists are snobs, psychologists are strange, and biologists are lovers of minutiae.