Summary:
Watch the video and think about:
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Marina Gulline: You have explored many quirky areas such as the science behind lying, love and laughter.
Why are you interested in these things?
Dr Richard Wiseman: Before I take on an area I know that I'm going to have to devote a huge amount of time
to looking into it and so I tend to choose areas that I personally find interesting.
Also, because a lot of my work is about talking about my research, the public or the media, I tend to want
to find areas that people find interesting outside of psychology.
And so for any of my areas I have a test before I sort of dive into it, which is I go to a party, occasionally
I'm invited and I go to them and these are not full of academics, or other psychologists, they're full of
normal people and they mention particular topics and if they're interested then it'll be a topic that I'll take forward.
If they kind of glaze over and just change the topic of conversation then I'm unlikely to research that area.
So, if we talk about jokes for example, you know what's the world's funniest joke, do men and women have the same sense of humour?
Well, that's going to be a topic of conversation, people are interested in that.
If you go speed dating, what's the best chat up line you should use?
How can you tell whether someone's lying?
All these areas interest people and so it makes my job as communicator much, much easier because people are already interested in the topics.
Summary:
As you watch the video, think about:
Captions:
Marina Gulline: Tell us about your favourite study. What did it reveal?
Dr Richard Wiseman: My favourite area, my goodness.
I have a soft spot for, really two things, one is the psychology of lying because it was the first mass
participation experiment I did and so this was with the BBC in the UK and we had a political interviewer,
a guy called Robin Day and we had him lie and tell the truth about his favourite film, we showed those on
television and we had people try and vote which was the lie and they were at chance fifty-fifty.
Which is the same sort of results you should get in the lab, people really are not very good lie detectors.
When we just played the sound track on national radio, suddenly people were much, much better.
And again this reflects the fact that if you want to detect a liar you're better off listening rather than
watching because the better signals are in the voice and how they use words.
And so I have a soft spot for that experiment because it was the first mass participation thing that we did.
There was about 30 000 people took part in it, it was about twelve years ago.
I guess my favourite thing of all is the laugh lab experiment where we did the scientific search, the
world's funniest joke, we collected 40 000 jokes from around the world, one and a half million people rating how funny they are.
We found the world's funniest joke, it's not very funny.
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