Accident and agency: a mixed methods study contrasting luck and interactivity in problem solving

Abstract

Problem solving in a materially rich environment requires interacting with chance.Sixty-four participants were invited to solve 5-letter anagrams presented as movable tiles in conditions that either allowed the participants to move the tiles as they wished or only allowed random shuffling (without rearranging the tiles post shuffling) thus contrasting pure luck with an interactive model. We hypothesised that shuffling would break unhelpful mental sets and introduce beneficial unplanned problem-solving trajectories. However, participants performed significantly worse when shuffling, which suggests luck plays less of a role than has been previously suggested. Granular analysis of seven critical cases revealed arbitrary path dependency across both conditions and moments of missed luck. It also questions current models of non-agentic luck and the ability to separate agent and luck. This research has implications for fostering better problem solving in an uncertain and fluid world.

Serendipity in Scientific Research

“…Until now, serendipity research has relied very much on narratives shared by scientists and others, from those passed down through history (Van Andel, 1994) to written in tweets online (Bogers & Björneborn, 2013;Rubin et al, 2011), as evidence and counterargument for definitions, diagrams and frameworks of serendipity as it happens. Recently, this research has moved away from the narrative and toward empirical research (Erdelez, 2004;Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2022) as a resource for greater understanding, and with this move the theory has moved from categorization of the phenomena we call serendipity to analysis of its components and the conditions in which it occurs (or does not, for that matter). The narratives in this series, then, will be taken as a testing ground for emergent serendipity theory, illustrating what it can add to our understanding of how discoveries are made as well as offering an opportunity to prove or to question generalizations now being made from historical, familiar cases.…”

Accidental Thinking: A Model of Serendipity’s Cognitive Processes

“…At that stage, the participant did not notice the accident, but the SCM would hypothesise that their epistemic landscape had changed, and this may have allowed them to be more able to recognise the helpful accident later. The SCM’s predictions that unexpected and theoretically implausible events need to be experienced more than once to shift the weighting of theoretical plausibility may explain the lack of a reliable effect of hints (or clues pointing to a solution) on problem-solving under a short time span when hints are only presented once (Ormerod et al, 2002; Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2022).…”

The possibilities of disruption: Serendipity, accidents and impasse driven search

“…Similarly, we do not career from moment to moment, as passive receptors of ideas from random combinations. Indeed, we know from empirical research that the positive aspects of noticed accidents and hints are actually rarely exploited by the problem solver (Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2021c, 2022a) although subliminal hints can be (Hattori et al, 2013). In fact, we do not know much of what determines whether these accidents are enacted or not.…”

“… 11. While I have undertaken my own research which specifically focussed on accidents (Ross & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2021c, 2022a) as has Kirsh (2014) and Gavurin (1967), I think it is profitable to survey the literature where it was not expected to demonstrate it ubiquity, however I point the interested reader to these papers where chance was more explicitly manipulated. …”