Richard Wiseman’s book “Quirkology” has just been published in the US, so he was back on my show today to talk about some of the curious psychology experiments he has conducted.
Many of them include studying lies, deception, and paranormal nonsense. In one, he pitted a “financial astrologer” against a stock broker against a 4-year-old girl to see who could pick winning companies. Guess who won.
Wiseman has also studied visual perception. In May, his Total Recall experiment put two subjects into a room and exposed them to 10,000 images over the course of two days, then tested them to see how many they could recall correctly, with surprising results. In another, he investigated the importance of how you look, whether you’re running for political office or you’re the defendant in a criminal trial.
Listen to our conversation here.