Tag: richard-wiseman
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Reliable Lie Detection Cues
We mistakenly attribute fidgeting, stuttering and avoidance of eye contact as outward signals of mendacity, suggests recent research into lie detection, showing that these are some of the least accurate ways to predict whether or not someone is lying. Instead, the most reliable way to tell if someone is lying is by listening carefully: Professor…
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Evidence-Based Methods to Become Lucky
In an attempt to discover whether there were genuine personality traits that separate the lucky from the unlucky, Richard Wiseman studied 400 people over a number of years and discovered that there are indeed behavioural differences between the lucky and luckless—and that we can ‘learn’ these traits to improve our luck. Wiseman states that the…
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Goal Setting and Affluence
You’ve heard of the Yale Goal-Setting Study, right? The one that goes like this: In 1953 a team of researchers interviewed Yale’s graduating seniors, asking them whether they had written down the specific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the…
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Superstition and Irrationality
I’d like to class myself as a fairly rational being, but we all have our transgressions, right? So are we all maybe a bit superstitious? To answer this, Richard Wiseman offers this common thought experiment from Bruce Hood’s new book, Supersense: Imagine that you only have two objects in your house: 1) A £10 watch that was given to you by…