Richard Wiseman

Introduction

Richard John Wiseman, born 16 September 1966 in Luton, Bedfordshire, is a British psychologist who holds the chair in the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire — the first such professorship in Britain. He came to psychology by an unusual route: a teenage street magician who found the audience more interesting than the trick, and who has spent his career on the topics mainstream psychology tends to avoid — luck, lying, humour, and why people believe things that are not true. He is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a patron of Humanists UK, and his books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

Wiseman is a genuinely difficult figure to place. He is a working academic who has published in Psychological Bulletin and PLoS ONE, and also a television performer whose YouTube channels have accumulated hundreds of millions of views. That combination is his contribution and, in the eyes of his critics, his problem.

Early Life and Education

Learning from an audience

Wiseman's mother was a seamstress and his father an engineer. He found a library book on magic at about eight years old and, by his teens, was one of the youngest members of the Magic Circle in London and working the crowds in Covent Garden. The street performing did more than pay; it taught him to read a room. As he has put it, "Sometimes you would start your act and after five minutes there was no audience" — you adapt or you stop. Decades later, that instinct is visible in how he designs experiments: he wants the result to land with a general audience, not only with reviewers.

From UCL to the Koestler Unit

At eighteen he went to University College London to study psychology, partly because, as he has said, it was "right around the corner." He shared student accommodation with Adrian Owen, who also became a psychologist. He then moved to Edinburgh for a doctorate completed in 1992 under Robert L. Morris, the first professor of parapsychology at the university's Koestler Parapsychology Unit — a chair now held by Wiseman's partner, Caroline Watt.

The thesis, The assessment of psychic claimants: an application of schema theory to the evaluation of strong psychic claims, set the pattern for everything that followed. Wiseman was not studying whether psychic powers exist in the abstract; he was studying why particular people become convinced that they have them, and how such claims can be evaluated. He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research from 1991 to 2004, for most of that time on its governing Council — an unusual position for someone who would become one of Britain's best-known debunkers.

Academic and Professional Career

The public understanding chair

After Edinburgh he went to the University of Hertfordshire and became Britain's first professor in the public understanding of psychology. The title is not honorary; it describes a research programme in which the experiment itself is designed to be participated in. LaughLab, Dream:ON, and the remote-viewing mass tests all recruit the public as subjects and then report back to them, which is why they attract hundreds of thousands of volunteers and a great deal of press.

Theatre of Science and the BBC

Early at Hertfordshire he worked with Simon Singh on a BBC segment for National Science Week in which a politician made a statement across television, radio and print and the public voted on whether he was telling the truth in each medium. It was the first time the two met, and it led to a live show, Theatre of Science, in which Wiseman stood in a cage between two Tesla coils while lightning struck. The Luck Factor exists because of Singh: after the success of Fermat's Last Theorem, Singh introduced Wiseman to his agent and suggested he write something comparable in psychology.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Luck as a measurable set of habits

Wiseman's best-known programme began from a simple observation: the number of people who describe themselves as persistently lucky or unlucky seemed too large for chance. He advertised in newspapers and recruited several hundred volunteers who identified as exceptionally lucky or unlucky, then followed them for around three years with interviews, questionnaires, and laboratory tasks.

The finding was that the two groups differ in behaviour, not in fortune. Self-described lucky people create and notice more chance opportunities — they are more outgoing and keep looser routines; they act on intuition more readily; they expect good outcomes and therefore persist; and they convert bad events into good ones by rehearsing how much worse they might have been. In one demonstration, lucky participants told they had been shot during a bank robbery said they were lucky not to have been killed; unlucky participants said they were unlucky to have been shot. Wiseman distilled this into four principles and a "Luck School" in which volunteers spent a month deliberately practising them; he reported that about 80 per cent were happier, more satisfied with life, and felt luckier afterwards.

Deception

Wiseman's deception work covers both how liars behave and how badly observers detect them. It is the strand that fits most naturally with his background: the magician who knows that an audience sees what it is directed to see. It also underwrites his sceptical work, since the same misdirection that sustains a stage illusion sustains many reported paranormal experiences.

LaughLab and mass-participation experiments

In 2001 Wiseman ran LaughLab, an international search for the world's funniest joke, which collected tens of thousands of jokes and ratings and produced a winner about a caller to the emergency services who shoots his collapsed friend to comply with the instruction "First, let's make sure he's dead." The project also mapped regional and national variation in what people find funny, which is the part with lasting scientific interest. LaughLab established the template Wiseman has used since: a huge, self-selected, online sample and a headline result that people can act on.

Anomalous experience without the paranormal

His 2000 Hampton Court Palace study tested three accounts of ghostly experience — prior belief, suggestion, and local magnetic fields. Around 600 members of the public completed questionnaires measuring belief in ghosts; half were then given positive suggestion about unusual phenomena at the site and half the opposite, and all were sent to walk the palace. Experiences correlated with prior belief and with suggestion, and location data hinted at an association with magnetic fields. The design is a model of how to study an anomalous experience without having to adjudicate on whether ghosts exist.

The Bem replication

In 2011 Daryl Bem reported evidence for precognition, including retroactive facilitation of recall. Wiseman, with Chris French and Stuart Ritchie, ran three pre-registered independent replications and failed to reproduce the effect each time. Because the attempts were pre-registered and published regardless of outcome, they count among the more useful methodological interventions of the replication crisis.

From debunking to wonder

The most recent phase of his work is not about catching people out. With Caroline Watt he has turned to what illusion does for an audience rather than what it does to them. Seeing the impossible (Wiseman & Watt, 2024, PeerJ, 12, e17308) tested whether watching magic improves positive emotion, optimism and wellbeing; he published a commentary in the same year on magic therapy improving daily bimanual task performance in children with unilateral spastic cerebral palsy (Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology); and in 2023 he published Magic, a short book in Emerald's Arts for Health series. A sceptic who spent two decades explaining why people are fooled has ended up arguing that being fooled, in the right frame, is worth studying as a good.

He has also turned the critical apparatus back on his own genre. Do ambiguous images provide psychological insights? Testing a popular claim (Wiseman & Watt, 2025, PeerJ, 13, e19022) took 300 Prolific participants, showed them four classic ambiguous figures — the duck–rabbit, the younger/older woman, Rubin's vase, the horse–seal — and administered a Five Factor measure alongside scales for optimism, procrastination, holistic thinking and decision-making style. Most of what the social-media versions of these images claim about personality received no support, which the authors call "a new type of psychological myth." A few small associations survived: seeing the duck first went with lower emotional stability and lower optimism, seeing the faces in Rubin's vase with higher openness rather than the detail-focus the claim predicts, and seeing the older woman first with older actual age. It is a demonstration aimed at the same instinct his own Quirkology traded on — that a parlour demonstration can be read as a window into character — and it does not spare that instinct.

The methodological turn

Wiseman's 2023–2026 output is largely methodological rather than topical. With Watt he published Study preregistration: an early example and analysis (PeerJ, 2026, 14, e21360), and with Watt and James E. Kennedy, The emerging disenchantment with retrospective meta-analysis (Nature Human Behaviour, 2026, 10(6), 1019–1021). The second is worth noticing in his bibliography for a reason that is not stated in the paper: his own career-defining controversy was fought over exactly that instrument, with both sides arguing about which studies belonged in the pool and whether the selection had been made in good faith. In The Psychologist he has argued that psychology needs a "fascination revolution" (2026, 39(3), 26–28) and, with Watt, that the discipline would gain from taking the paranormal more seriously rather than less (2025, 38(11), 12–15) — a long way from the position that made his name, and one that answers the older charge that scepticism was his subject rather than his method.

Major Publications

  • The Luck Factor: Changing Your Luck, Changing Your Life (2003)
  • Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives (2007)
  • 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot (2009)
  • Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There (2011)
  • The As If Principle: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life (2012)
  • Shoot for the Moon: How the Moon Landings Taught Us the 8 Secrets of Success (2019)
  • Magic (2023), in Emerald's Arts for Health series — on illusion as a route to wellbeing rather than a vehicle for deception

Impact and Legacy

An audience nobody else was reaching

Wiseman's achievement is reach. Whole research literatures on lying, luck, humour and anomalous experience now reach the public through one person's books, videos and mass experiments, and a generation of British psychology students encountered the subject first through him. He received CSI's Education in Science Award in 2000 and its Robert B. Balles Prize for Critical Thinking in 2011 for Paranormality. Whatever one thinks of the format, the alternative — specialists publishing only for other specialists — has never filled that space.

Criticism and controversy

The ganzfeld meta-analysis dispute. In 1999 Julie Milton and Wiseman published a Psychological Bulletin meta-analysis of thirty ganzfeld studies conducted between 1987 and 1997, reporting an effect size of 0.013 (Stouffer Z = 0.70, p = .24) and concluding that the technique "does not at present offer a replicable method for producing ESP in the laboratory." Parapsychologists immediately attacked the selection of studies. The largest and unsuccessful study in the set had departed from the standard protocol by using musical rather than visual targets; the most successful of Adrian Parker's studies was omitted; and a highly significant study by Kathy Dalton was excluded as an "outlier." Storm and Ertel (2001) assembled a seventy-nine-study database and obtained an effect size of 0.138 (Z = 5.66), restoring Bem and Honorton's positive conclusion. Bem, Palmer and Broughton (2001) then had three judges blind to outcome rate all forty studies for adherence to standard procedure and found that adherence predicted scoring rate — a result that, in the Psi Encyclopedia's words, reinforced doubts about the integrity of the Wiseman and Milton review. Wiseman and Milton defended the cut-off: only studies conducted after the Psychophysical Research Laboratory work counted as genuine replications of it. The disagreement is really about which studies belong in the evidential base, and it has never been settled.

His own anomalous result. In a 1997 laboratory test of luckiness and psi (Smith et al.), self-rated lucky participants performed no better than unlucky ones on a guessing task. But the analysis also found a significant positive correlation between predicted psi performance and actual psi performance, which the authors reported as providing some support for the psi hypothesis. For a leading sceptic this is an awkward finding, and it is one he has largely let stand rather than explained away.

The luck research is correlational and self-selected. Participants were recruited by newspaper advertisement because they already believed themselves lucky or unlucky; the four principles are inferred from differences in self-report between those two groups; and the headline "80 per cent became luckier" is self-reported change drawn from Wiseman's own popular account, not an outcome from a published randomised controlled trial. No objective change in fortune was ever measured, and the honest reading of the first principle is that it increases exposure to opportunities rather than altering anyone's odds.

Scale is not control. LaughLab, Dream:ON and the remote-viewing tests were built for participation and press coverage. They draw self-selected samples, generally have no control condition, and reduce to a single winner or headline — excellent for engagement, weak for inference. Wiseman has never claimed otherwise, but the format encourages readers to take mass-participation findings as equivalent to controlled ones.

Popularisation flattens evidence. Books like 59 Seconds package single studies into actionable techniques. The underlying experiments are often small, and the confident framing travels further than the caveats — the same criticism that has dogged the positive-psychology popularisers of his generation.

The recent work repeats the older pattern in a new register. The magic-and-wellbeing studies are small, self-selected and short-term, and the outcome measured is a mood state in the minutes after the trick rather than anything that persists — which is the same shape as the "80 per cent felt luckier" finding, and invites the same caution. The ambiguous-images paper is more interesting as a self-criticism than as a refutation: demolishing a pop-psychology claim with a 300-person online sample establishes that the claim was unsupported, which was never in much doubt, while the few associations that survived are small enough that reporting them at all risks supplying a new version of the myth he has just dismantled. And there is an unresolved tension in the late position: arguing simultaneously that psychology should study the paranormal more closely and that retrospective meta-analysis is losing credibility removes two of the tools with which anomalous claims have historically been adjudicated, without saying what should replace them.

Learn More

References

  • Wiseman, R. (2003). The Luck Factor. Miramax.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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