459. From Moon Landings to Magic: Exploring Quirky Psychology feat. Richard Wiseman

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

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How does drawing from experiments and scientists on the fringes of science help all of science and strengthen the core? How does luck actually work? How did the early members of NASA treat scientists who made mistakes in the quest to reach the moon?

Richard Wiseman is a professor of the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, a magician, performer, and the author of several books. Two of his latest titles are Moonshot: What Landing a Man on the Moon Teaches Us About Collaboration, Creativity, and the Mind-set for Success and Quirkology: The Curious Science of Everyday Lives.

Greg and Richard discuss Richard's unique career path, his popular books, and how psychology can have real-world applications. The conversation delves into various topics such as the public's fascination with luck, the importance of empirical research, and the psychology behind the successful teamwork that achieved the Apollo moon landings.

Wiseman also shares insights from his background in magic and how it has influenced his understanding of human perception and deception. The episode highlights the need for applying psychological research to improve everyday life and the significant role of creativity and open-mindedness in both science and education.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Why conservative thinking limits scientific innovation

34:01: Organizations, I think, have become very conservative in terms of risk-taking, which is sort of sad for the next generation of students within science. I think we want to encourage people to be expansive thinkers, to have crazy ideas. Obviously, you need to find out whether they're true or not. But again, even within science, I think we're quite conservative. We want to encourage students to think in a certain way, to do science in a certain way, and so on. And I'm just rather pro the more maverick approach in some extent; the only students we have are those people that are good at passing exams. And I often think, I wonder what talent is out there that just happened to not be so good at passing exams—that maybe who have had creative, amazing ideas that would have changed the world, and they don't sit in our labs or in our universities because they're not the sort of people who want to sit in a hall and write something on a piece of paper.

Why is creativity important in science?

37:56: I'm so pro-creativity in science and getting people to think differently because that's where your good ideas are going to come from, and sometimes those people are not the ones that perform best in an exam hall. They're the ones who just want to get out there and change the world.

What magic taught Richard about psychology

50:47: Magic is incredibly important, and it shows you, fundamentally, that you can be very, very confident and very, very wrong. You know, when a magician shows you an empty box and makes something appear in it, the audience has to be 100 percent certain that there's nothing in that box. And they are 100 percent wrong because an object is going to appear in that box. So it should teach us a bit of humility as well.

How Quirkology was born from a disappointing psychology experience

21:06: Quirkology came about because psychology broke my heart a bit. People are astonishing—when you think of your friends, partners, and family, they're amazing, complex, and fun to talk about. They experience emotions, behave differently in crowds, do things that surprise you, do things that disappoint you, and so on. That kind of buzzy energy of humanity, which was the reason I got into psychology, I really just loved it. Then I'd open a psychology journal, and I just saw this dusty old paper that reduced that buzzing humanity to a number that wasn't very interesting, and I thought, there must be some interesting psychology out there; there has to be. And that was the path into quirkology, where it was all the quirky psychology that I love, some of which I've carried out myself.

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