Metacognition and Reflection by Interdisciplinary Experts: Insights from Cognitive Science and Philosophy

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article

Group privacy management strategies and challenges in Facebook : a focus group study among Flemish youth organizations

A large body of research has studied young people’s privacy practices and needs in Facebook. Less is known about group privacy. In this study 12 focus groups were organized with a total of 78 adolescents and young adults of local Flemish youth organizations to discuss their privacy practices. Findings describe how different strategies are used to coordinate the group information flow. The study also shows how online group privacy management can be challenging because ‘implicit’ privacy rules need to be made ‘explicit’, personal boundaries may conflict with those of the group one belongs to and privacy turbulence is difficult to define

Tribal metaphors in social game design: creating conflict and camaraderie through context

This paper briefly explores the emergence of tribal patterns in social play. The formation of community groups is not just a result of game design, but a fundamental part of the social nature of the species. Tribal effects, such as favouritism towards fellow group members, have been studied by social psychologists for decades (e.g. [22,15,7]). We highlight some specific existing mechanics that enable and encourage this kind of behaviour in social games, and identify the importance of social feedback in generating tribal feelings. An experiment is described, that explores the minimal conditions of tribal behaviour player groups in social games. Specifically, it identifies the importance of feedback on social context in supporting the emergence of in-group favouring tribal play