Ever wondered why we cry when we laugh and whether there's a relationship between our personalities and our ringtones? Richard Wiseman has devoted his life to investigating the most fascinating facts
RICHARD Wiseman has made a career out of investigating the bizarre, the baffling and the mind-boggling. He has discovered scientific snippets ranging from how many people it takes to start a Mexican wave to how to influence the amount donated to good causes by changing the appearance of the charity box.
Other oddities the affable psychologist has studied include how your surname influences your life and why people in Delhi are more helpful than Londoners. He has even canvassed thousands of people to discover the world's funniest joke. And all in the name of science.
An ex-magician, Professor Wiseman, head of a research unit at the University of Hertfordshire, is no ordinary academic. He has spent the best part of 20 years investigating the quirky side of human behaviour.
He is a mine of seemingly trivial information. He knows, for instance, that a disproportionate number of marine biologists are called Dr Fish. And that tall people tend to be more successful than shorter ones.
Some might think this is all scientific tosh, but the award-winning academic, Britain's only Professor in the Public Understanding of Psychology, has an international reputation for his research into unusual areas including deception, luck, humour and the paranormal.
He has now written Quirkology, a compilation of many of his unusual studies and what they mean in our everyday lives.
Fascinating facts include how many people it takes to start a Mexican wave in a football stadium (between 25 and 35) and the perceived personality traits of fruit and vegetables (lemons are dislikeable, onions stupid, and mushrooms social climbers).
Also, people born during summer are luckier than those born in winter, while left-hand gloves go missing more often than right-hand ones.
"Science doesn't need to have implications to make life more interesting," Wiseman insists. "If you went to an art gallery and said, 'What's the use in this?', you'd be seen as a philistine.
"Science should be seen in the same way as art. The fact that science helps us to understand our behaviour is fascinating and makes the world a more interesting, curious place."
Wiseman has carried out many experiments on unwitting members of the public over the years - how they react on seeing a £20 note on the ground, how frequently they honk their horn when a car stalls in front of them, that sort of thing.
He has interrupted amorous couples in the street, asking, 'Excuse me, do you mind taking part in a psychology experiment? How many seconds have passed since I said the words Excuse me?', to prove that people massively underestimate the passing of time when they are in love.
He has even used well-known celebrities, including Naked Gun actor Leslie Nielsen and the late Sir Robin Day, to take part in lying tests to discover that the best way to detect a lie is to listen rather than look - liars say less, give fewer details and use the word 'I' less than people telling the truth.
A former member of the Magic Circle, Wiseman's love of more unusual phenomena dates back to his days as a professional magician, he says.
"If you're into magic you are fooling people. There's a huge amount of psychology in every card trick or whatever it is you are doing."
Searching for the world's funniest joke is among his favourite studies. In 2001, he and a team of scientists carried out the year-long study, setting up an internet-based project called LaughLab, in which people could submit their favourite joke to an archive and rate how funny they found a random selection of jokes from that archive.
By the end of the project the team had received 40,000 jokes and had them rated by more than 350,000 people from 70 countries. And the winning joke, rated as funny by 55 per cent of those who took part in the survey, was: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, 'My friend is dead! What can I do?' The operator says: 'Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead.' There is silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: 'Okay, now what?'
Wiseman is also fascinated with the science of personal ads, with studies showing that women would do better if men wrote their personal ads.
Wider issues have emerged, though, from his research. On a trip to New Zealand, he was irritated by the fact that people were walking much slower than he was.
"You then realise that actually the UK has a pace of life that's not shared by other parts of the world. I thought, well how much can you tell about a country by the speed of walking? It turns out it's highly correlated with when people are wearing watches, how accurate the watches are, how quickly they are speaking, factors which are then related to heart disease in a city."
The study showed that the speed at which people walk has increased by 10 per cent in the last decade. People were in the greatest hurry in Singapore. In the UK the fastest walkers were in London, followed by Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff.
He says that investigating the quirky stuff in life is a serious science - but how does he justify the true value of a lot of it?
"Your surname may have an influence on your life, which is one of the online experiments we're doing at the moment. That could really matter.
"If your three initials are negative, such as RIP or DIE, then you die three years earlier on average than someone with positive initials such as JOY or ACE, because it has a psychological impact on how you see yourself." Although these things are fun, there's a serious side to all of them.
"What I choose to research is driven by other people," he continues. "The other day a guy said to me, 'How come I can remember where everything is in my house except where I've left my car keys?' That's a great question! We could do something with that."
Wiseman will not be deterred by critics who might feel sceptical about the worth of his research.
"I hope that my fellow academics will be encouraged to carry out more work that is both interesting and unusual. That they will, for instance, discover whether blondes really do have more fun, why we daydream, the relationship between people's personality and their mobile ringtone, why some people are more likeable than others, whether ventriloquists have multiple personalities, whether wearing school uniform makes children less creative and why we cry when we are happy.
"In short, I dream of a world packed full of researchers examining the more offbeat and quirky aspects of life."
Quirkology by Richard Wiseman (Macmillan, £14.99.
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