Richard John Wiseman (born 16 September 1966) is a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. He has written several psychology books. He has given keynote addresses to the Royal Society, the Swiss Economic Forum, Google and Amazon. He is a fellow for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a patron of Humanists UK. Wiseman is also the creator of the YouTube channels Quirkology and In59Seconds.
Early life and education Wiseman was born and raised in Luton. His mother a seamstress and his father an engineer, he learned his trade as a teenage magician working the crowds in Covent Garden. At 18, he continued as a street performer and went to University College London to study psychology, partly because it "was right around the corner". He shared accommodation as a student with Adrian Owen, later also to become a psychologist. In his years as a street performer he learned how to adapt or get out of what you are doing because "Sometimes you would start your act and after five minutes there was no audience." He moved to Edinburgh where he obtained his PhD in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh for research supervised by Robert L. Morris.
Career and research After completing his PhD, he became Britain's first professor in the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. In his early years at the University of Hertfordshire, Wiseman partnered with Simon Singh on a BBC segment about lying for the National Science Week. The segment spanned TV, radio and print and featured a "politician making a statement, and letting the public vote on whether they thought this figure was telling the truth in each medium." It was the first time that Wiseman and Singh met. From the beginning, the two got along well and on Singh's idea, ended up creating a show together called Theatre of Science. The show aimed to deliver science to the audience in an entertaining manner. Wiseman describes how one stunt involved standing in a cage between two Tesla coils while lightning struck the cage. Wiseman ended up writing The Luck Factor in part due to Singh as well. With the success of Singh's book, Fermat's Last Theorem, Singh introduced Wiseman to his agent and encouraged him to write a similar book in the psychology arena, which led to The Luck Factor.
Psychological research Wiseman critically examines and frequently debunks unusual phenomena, including reports of paranormal phenomena. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). His research has been published in numerous academic journals, reported at various conferences, and featured on television. Wiseman has studied the principles of good and bad luck, publishing the results in the self-help book The Luck Factor. He showed that both good and bad luck result from measurable habits; for example, lucky people, by expecting good luck, might expend more effort in their endeavours, resulting in more success, reinforcing their belief in good luck. Lucky people are outgoing and observant and therefore have many more chance encounters than unlucky people, each of which could bring a lucky opportunity. Moreover, lucky people are more likely to look on the bright side of 'bad' encounters. In a mental exercise describing being shot during a bank robbery, lucky people considered themselves lucky not to have been killed while unlucky people considered themselves unlucky to have been shot.
Public engagement Wiseman prefers to make discuss, research and think about the implications of his work; instead of talking directly about eyewitness testimony in law, he would set something up that looked like it, such as his colour-changing card trick. In this mindset, he has presented keynote addresses to organisations around the world and in well known forums and congresses like the Swiss Economic Forum and ESOMAR Congress. In 2001, Wiseman led LaughLab, an international experiment to find the world's funniest joke. The winning joke described a caller to emergency services who shoots his friend who has collapsed to comply with the instruction "First, let's make sure he's dead". The experiment also explored regional and cultural variations in humour. These public psychology experiments – such as enlisting people to name, and rate, their favourite gags in the search for the world's funniest jokes – have drawn hundreds of thousands of participants and plenty of press. In 2011, Wiseman wrote the first section of a collaborative story at Libboo in an attempt to produce a full-length novel in two months. The final result of this experiment, was a novel called, Paradox: The Curious Life, and Mysterious Death, of Mr Joseph Wheeler. In 2013 Richard Wiseman became the first guest curator at Edinburgh's International Science Festival. He participated in the festival with "Richard Wiseman's Beginners Guide to... Climate Change". In 2014 he does a repeat of his 'Beginners Guide to' but this time with 3 different talks:
"Richard Wiseman's Beginners Guide to... Fermat's Last Theorem" with writer and broadcaster Simon Singh. "Richard Wiseman's Beginners Guide to... Astrobiology" with Imperial College's Dr Zita Martins. "Richard Wiseman's Beginners Guide to... the Earth" with earth scientist and broadcaster Hermione Cockburn (BBC). Wiseman has also become a content creator on YouTube after uploading a video of the colour changing card trick in 2007 that has 6. 5 million views as of April 2020. He is best known for his "Bets You Will Always Win" series, which has amassed over 60 million views throughout 10 videos. On 7 January 2014, Wiseman uploaded a video to a new channel called "59 Seconds" in promotion of his book of the same name. Wiseman is a patron of Humanists UK and appeared in the Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People Christmas stage show organised by the New Humanist. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of Humanist Society Scotland. In 2017 Wiseman interviewed Richard Dawkins at CSIcon Las Vegas 2017 covering topics on evolution, extra terrestrials and god.
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