Richard Wiseman

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you tell if someone is lying? When Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, conducted a nationwide experiment to identify the tell-tale signs, the results were surprising. If you want to spot a liar, don’t look at them. Listen to what they say and how they say it. in If you want to distinguish fact from fiction, radio, not TV or video is your friend. Visual cues distract us from what is being said and good liars can control their body language more easily than their voice. Depressingly, Richard has also shown that our nearest and dearest are the most able to deceive us. Richard is a rare breed: a scientist who is also a practising magician. By the age of 17 he was performing magic tricks at children’s parties and a member of the exclusive Magic Circle. He chose to study psychology to try and understand why we believe the unbelievable and spent many years doing research on the paranormal: studying séances, haunted places and extra sensory perception. Could a belief in the paranormal be the price we pay for scientific discovery, he wonders? Jim Al-Khalili talks to Richard about his magical Life Scientific and finds out more about his work on lying, ESP and luck. Are some people born lucky or is it a mind-set that can be learnt? Producer: Anna Buckley

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.1	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. Comedy is a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know, I also know that comedy is really
0:24.3	subjective and everyone has different tastes. So we've got a huge range of comedy on offer from
0:29.8	satire to silly, shocking to soothing, profound to just general pratting about.
0:35.0	So if you fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:40.0	I'm Jumel Gilei and in discovery today I'm in conversation with another leading scientist.
0:46.0	Today's interview was recorded in front of an audience in the BBC Tent at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival. Magic and science occupy opposite ends of the spectrum in most people's minds,
0:59.4	but my guest on the life scientific today is both a magician and a scientist.
1:04.6	Richard Wiseman was admitted into the elite group of magicians, the magic circle, when he was
1:09.0	just 17 years old.
1:11.0	He studied psychology at University College London and followed up with a PhD in
1:15.0	paracy, keen to prove that there's no such thing as psychic power.
1:19.8	He's the only scientist I know who's done research during seances and in haunted places.
1:25.6	In 1995 he conducted one of the first nationwide experiments, the Mega Lab truth test,
1:31.3	in which he examined our ability to detect whether people are lying or
1:34.6	telling the truth. spoiler alert it's much easier to spot a liar on the radio
1:39.0	than it is when watching them on TV. Richard also conducted mass participation experiments on extrasensory perception and
1:46.1	luck.
	...

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