Measuring Serendipity in the Lab: The Effects of Priming and Monitoring

While the phenomenon of serendipity has proven to be a popular research topic, the issue of how to measure it effectively still relatively unexplored. We present an exploratory study that contributes to our understanding of this issue by examining the effect of (1) priming people about the concept of serendipity and (2) monitoring participants on how they experience serendipity when searching for information in a controlled environment. Our experiments indicate that it is best to keep such controlled experiments as natural as possible: priming participants about serendipity and monitoring them during their experiments seem to have a negative influence on experiencing serendipity, as they are more likely to induce participants to stay on task instead of exhibiting diverging information behavior.