The illusion and reality of research

Research: Your work focuses on tricks and illusions, and things that are fun or quirky. But the psychology that lies behind it all is important. Do you ever worry that people won’t take this kind of thing seriously?
Wiseman: Some people will just see it as fun and say, that’s interesting. I would hope a few people then go slightly beyond that and look at the implications. I want people to find that for themselves.

A lot of my work is quite oblique. If somebody asked me, will you look at eyewitness testimony in the law, I wouldn’t set something up that looked like an eyewitness testimony experiment. I’d set up something up like the colour changing card trick.

My job is to give people something to talk about. I can convey almost nothing in a 45-minute talk, but if you can make people go outside, talk about it among themselves, go on the web, find other material, think about the implications for themselves, then you’ll start to get something rolling in that person.

What’s your view of market research, given that a lot of it is based on asking people questions in a way that, as your work shows, often doesn’t work?
I think that’s the answer to that question! When you ask somebody a question and they tell you how they’re going to behave, that doesn’t tell you how they’re going to behave. Make of that what you will. If you want to run a survey where you ask people what they’re going to do next week, know that what they tell you will have no validity at all.

Are you sceptical of market research results when you hear them mentioned in the press, for example?
It depends how the data have been collected and how it’s being presented. I think there’s rising scepticism among people now who are using Twitter and Facebook and so on. You’re seeing that the old days of, “This is a fact, we found it out last week”, or the notion of, “I read it in the newspaper therefore it’s true” – those days are gone. Instead, these things are being pulled apart and looked at more sceptically, so there’s going to have to be much more sophisticated messaging, and it’s got to be true. So people are raising an eyebrow when they read that 50% of people are acting on global warming, which is just silly, and not having any impact I don’t think.

What sort of techniques are effective then?
Look at their behaviour. It’s that simple. To find out if someone’s hungry don’t ask them, see how much they’re eating at the next meal. It’s that straightforward. If you can’t measure the thing you’re trying to measure, you don’t know how they feel about it. Look at how they behave in a meaningful situation, in an embedded situation. And if you can’t do it, then don’t worry about it, but there’s no need to take another measure which you can take but which doesn’t tell you anything. You’re wasting your time.

Have you thought about applying your experimental techniques to business?
We do get approached by companies that want to find out what people think of their products and so on. But the sort of experiments I would run are time-consuming and relatively expensive compared to doing a survey, so I can see the attraction of just asking people.