Is it all just an illusion?

Most researchers would probably not want their work compared to a magician’s trick.

But in a keynote presentation at Esomar Congress in Amsterdam today, Richard Wiseman, chair in the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, drew parallels between card tricks, optical illusions, and the mind tricks we play on ourselves, leading us all to believe we are good at reporting and predicting our own behaviour.

The experiments of Wiseman, and many others, have shown that in reality, “we’re very very bad at predicting how we actually behave”.

One survey found that 95% of people said they would pick up litter if they saw it in the street. But when they left the building, only 2% picked up the litter which the researchers had left lying in the street.

Wiseman, who was a magician before he was a psychologist, kicked off with a simple magic trick, and shared various optical illusions to show the kinds of tricks our minds can play on us – even when we know it’s happening.

“We trip ourselves up,” he said. “We think our perception is very accurate but actually often we get it wrong. It’s the same when we come to think about how we would behave in a situation or why we behave in a certain way in a situation.”

He also spoke of how to get people involved in mass experiments, by creating something with the ability to go viral, making people feel involved and keeping experiments simple. Following these rules, Wiseman’s colour changing card trick (see below) has racked up more than 4.5 million views on YouTube.

We caught up with Wiseman after his talk to find out more – read the interview here.