Summary:
As you watch the video, think about these questions:
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Marina Gulline: Psychology often involves using humans as test subjects.
What particular problems can this cause for scientists?
Dr Richard Wiseman: Humans are difficult people to work with.
If you're a physicist or a chemist you're working with sort of objects as it were, molecules and they're in a sense a lot more predictable.
The problem with people is that they'll tell you what they think you want to hear, they'll lie to you some
of the time, they don't turn up for some of the experiments and also sometimes they don't do what you want them to do.
So, that they are quite difficult things to work with but the rewards are quite large if you get it right then you
actually get an insight into people's behaviour and thinking and that can be terribly exciting.
And so I like working with people, I tend to just like people perhaps because I'm a magician, it would be
very difficult to do magic and dislike people.
But, I find it endlessly fascinating, we've just made a very big series for the BBC.
We've been going out secretly filming people and then doing sort of weird things and seeing how they respond
and so we might take over a cafe, you sit down at a table, one of our stooges joins you and starts dunking their biscuit in your tea.
How do you react under those circumstances?
And just watching people react in these rather unusual ways is fascinating.
So, I just kind of like working with people.
Summary:
Listen to Richard talk about why he became a scientist and consider these questions:
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Marina Gulline: What made you want to become a scientist?
Dr Richard Wiseman: I became a scientist I think for two reasons, one is that I got bored doing magic,
magic is fascinating and wonderful but once you've done the same trick you know fifty times of an evening it's not so quite so wonderful.
So, I got a little bit bored with that and I think second because it allows me to find out things that we
don't currently know and that drives me forward.
I just think yeah we have amazing complexity of the social world, we have people falling in and out of love,
people arguing with one another, people laughing at each other's jokes or not laughing or laughing politely and understanding or whatever.
There's a huge complexity to the social world and we haven't even started to really understand what's really going on.
So, I think what drives me forward or what attracts me to it is that sense of exploration of being the first
person to find out something that we didn't know before.
Summary:
Watch the video and think about:
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Marina Gulline: Who has been an inspiration for your work?
Dr Richard Wiseman: I inspire myself which is enormously egotistical.
I find I'm the greatest inspiration for my own work, I'm joking.
I just quite like the idea of inspiring myself.
Lots of people have inspired me over the years.
I was very lucky at school to have some fantastic teachers that inspired me particularly in science and maths.
I think the type of people that inspire me are those that really tread new ground.
Whether it's in science or theatre or the arts or whatever, people who say 'Look, let's just do this differently and see what we find'.
And within science that happens a surprisingly amount of the time that a lot of scientists are just repeating
experiments with slight variations again and again.
But some are being very radical, some are being very revolutionary and going 'No, no, no let's look at this in a completely different way'.
I find that sort of thinking very inspirational.
Summary:
As you watch the video, consider these questions:
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Marina Gulline: For the students watching what advice would you give them?
Dr Richard Wiseman: I think there are fantastic opportunities within science to discover, to explore,
to be the first person to get your name in scientific journals and so on if that is your passion but if
it's not don't worry about it, go and do something else, but only for those people who are really into
science for science's sake I think the opportunities and the rewards are absolutely immense.
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