The man in the audio you're about to hear will tell you one truth and one lie. So, Sir Robin, what's your favourite film? Ah, some like it hot. So, Sir Robin, what's your favourite film? Gone with the Wind. So, could you tell which was the lie? Maybe you could, maybe you couldn't. And if you couldn't, by the end of this episode you'll have the tools needed to actually tell when someone is lying. and just as a warning shifting around in a seat or breaking eye contact well those things actually don't indicate if someone is lying find out what does after the break many of you in marketing will know that moment when the strategy is sorted the brief is done everyone's nodding along and then you realize someone actually has to make all of the content you've agreed on and usually that someone is you and usually it is needed by tomorrow now fortunately there is software to help. Breeze Assistant lives inside HubSpot. It drafts campaign copy, blog post, emails, all in your brand's tone of voice, and it's all grounded in actual customer data. With Breeze Assistant, you don't just create content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Hello, you are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome back the best-selling author, winner of the Royal Society's David Attenborough Award in 2023, half magician, half psychologist, it's Professor Richard Wiseman. I am a psychologist. I started my working life as a magician many, many years ago. I went to University College London and then to University of Edinburgh and now where I've been for the last 32 years, which is University of Hertfordshire as a professor of psychology. And I try and do stuff which is meaningful, which I find fun and I find interesting. And that has led me into all sorts of weird and wonderful places. That's my career. Professor Wiseman has been conducting thought-provoking, albeit rather strange, studies for several decades now. The very first real world study was an undergraduate. I was at UCL and I went over to Euston Station, railway station, and I would see couples that were either parting and therefore presumably unhappy or they were meeting one another and embracing and therefore happy and I would go up to them start a stopwatch in my pocket and say excuse me can you tell me how long it's been since I just said excuse me and the idea was the sad people time would would be extended happy people would be kind of collapsed down and I never got to find out if that was true or not because everyone thought I was so bizarre and strange, they just backed off from the psychologist, quite rightly so, and had nothing to do with me at all. That study failed, but a few years later, Richard Wiseman came up with a better idea for a study. Got to Hertfordshire, and I think within the first year or so, this email arrives from BBC. We're going to do a big study on Tomorrow's World, which is a science programme, live science programme at the time, and we're just looking for a big, big thing we can do with the whole nation. and I was studying psychology of lying and I suggested we got the politicians from the top I think it's three parties at the time put them on television they lie they tell the truth and we find out which party's got the best liars two weeks go by I get an email that's it my goodness we're choosing yours as the winning entry this is the study we're going to do very exciting we approach these politicians they all say no we're not having anything to do with that and the only thing that saved the day was Sir Robin Day. So he was a very well-known political interviewer at the time, sort of legendary, and he said, I'll do it. So I went along, interviewed him twice about his favourite film. One time he said he loved Gone with the Wind, other time he said he loved Some Like It Hot. There is unfortunately no public clips of these recordings available. However, Richard has printed the exact transcript of the interviews in his book, and with the help of AI, I can recreate the audio for you here. Now, this AI version, it is not perfect. The intonation won't be right. The accents aren't right. But pay attention to the language he uses, the pauses, the words, the length of the answers, because as we'll find out later on, all of these things can help determine if someone is lying. So here's the first interview. So, Sir Robin, what's your favourite film? Gone with the Wind. And why do you like that? Oh, it's a classic. Great characters. Great film star, Clark Gable. A great actress, Vivian Leigh. Very moving. Who's your favourite character in it? Oh, Gable. And how many times have you seen it? I think about half a dozen. And when was the first time that you saw it? I think that it was in 1939. Okay, time for the second interview. So, Sir Robin, what's your favourite film? Some like it hot And why do you like that? Oh, because it gets funnier every time that I see it There are all sorts of bits in it which I love And I like them more each time that I see it Who's your favourite character in it? Oh, Tony Curtis, I think He's so pretty And he's so witty And he mimics Cary Grant so well and he's very funny the way he tries to resist being seduced by Marilyn Monroe. And when was the first time that you saw it? I think when it came out and I forget when that was. And we put these things out the top of a live Tomorrow's World programme and then the idea was that people phoned in and we found out whether or not the public could detect lies by the end of the programme. Now, if I did that now, I would, quite frankly, be terrified. You've got to collect data live during a TV show and turn it around in your head. And you've only got 25 minutes for this. And it was just that thing of I was young and didn't know these things work. So I thought, well, that seems like a stress-free, fun way of fulfilling an evening. We go along. We put out the clips. I think it's the first science program to have interactivity like this with the phone calls in. With phone calls. And we get 30,000 of them in that time. and I can remember the results coming in, being handed a piece of paper, looking at it, having to turn around and walk on set and explain it. And it turned out that, and lots of lying research to back this up, the public couldn't tell between the two clips, couldn't tell which was the lie. And that was rather nice and that became the study. So, was Gone With The Wind the lie or was it some like it hot? Have a think, actually make a guess. Alright, if you guessed that Gone With The Wind was the lie, then you're correct. Sir Robin Day hated this film. He said when he was asked if it was his favourite film, good heavens, it's the most crashing bore, I fall asleep every time I see it. And yet, only 52% of the viewers correctly thought that Sir Robin had been lying about Gone With The Wind, and a massive 48% incorrectly thought he was lying about some like it hot. In other words, the public are rubbish at spotting a lie. A flipped coin is essentially just as good at spotting a liar. But I think you listening to Robin interview even though it was an AI version of it I think you probably fared better than the Tomorrow World viewers Here why What was also nice was prior to that they got on board national radio and also the Daily Telegraph newspaper So we'd put the audio only out on the radio, we'd put the transcript only out in the newspaper, and again had people vote. and what we saw was their attempts to detect the lie were much more accurate people on tv were roughly 50 50 it was about 60 in the newspaper about 70 on the radio and that fit the theory which was that when you focus people's attention on the words we say and how we say them we become much better lie detectors we're not good when it's just the visual stuff we tend to be driven by visual cues and actually they're pretty controllable particularly sir robin day who's used to being on television. Radio listeners detected the lie 73.4% of the time. Newspaper readers detected it 64.2% of the time, whereas television viewers only detected it 51.8% of the time. Charles Bond, a professor from Texas Christian University, has researched why we're worse at detecting liars when we see them talk. He's asked thousands of people from more than 60 countries to decide how they go about telling if someone is lying. And people's answers are Remarkably consistent. From Algeria to Argentina, from Ghana to Germany, almost everybody thinks that liars tend to avert their eyes, nervously wave their hands around, and shift about on their seats. But this isn't true. Wiseman writes how researchers have spent hours upon hours carefully comparing the films of liars and truth tellers. And it turns out, liars are just as likely to look you in the eye as a truth teller will be. They don't move their hands around nervously, and they don't shift about in their seats. If anything, they're a bit more static than truth tellers. People fail to detect lies because they're basing their opinion, their judgment, on behaviours that are not even associated with deception. Papers from 2000 and 2004 reveal what actually gives a liar away. Firstly, when it comes to lying, the more information you give away, the greater the chances that someone will catch you. So as a result, liars tend to say less and to provide fewer details than truth-tellers. Looking at Sir Robin Day's transcripts, his lie about Gone With The Wind contains only 40 words, whereas the truth about Some Like It Hot is nearly twice as long. Secondly, liars often try to distance themselves psychologically from their falsehoods, and so they tend to include fewer references to themselves and their feelings in their stories. Sir Robin's testimony provides a really striking illustration of this effect. when he lies, Sir Robin says the word I just twice. And how many times have you seen it? I think about half a dozen. And when was the first time that you saw it? I think that it was in 1939. Whereas when he tells the truth, he says I seven times. Oh, because it gets funnier every time that I see it. There are all sorts of bits in it which I love and I like them more each time that I see it. Tony Curtis, I think. I think when it came out, and I forget when that was. If you're telling a lie, you're less likely to say I. However, there's more. Wiseman writes that there is also the issue of forgetting. Imagine someone asks you a series of questions about what you did last week. It is probable that you will not remember everything you did last week, especially the trivial details. And being the honest person that you are, you would admit to your memory lapse. However, liars tend not to do this. when it comes to relatively unimportant information. Liars seem to develop super-powered memories and often recall the smallest details. Think Prince Andrew knowing exactly when he went to Pizza Express Woking. In contrast, truth-tellers know that they have forgotten certain details and they're happy to admit it. Sir Robin's interviews illustrate this point. There is only one instant when he admits to not remembering a detail and it's when he's telling the truth about not being able to recall the first time he saw his favourite film, Some Like It Hot. I think when it came out, and I forget when that was. So that was the truth test, got published in Nature, and was the very first quirky, weird thing that I did. And I say nowadays, quite frankly, I'd be terrified. Professor Wiseman debunked a few commonplace ideas here. We are not as good at spotting liars as we expect, and often the clues we think reveal a liar, well, they're not really clues at all. But he wasn't done there. Next, he wanted to test another major concept in the world of psychology, a concept you've almost certainly heard of. time to check the pulse and we begin with six degrees of separation scientists say it's not just a game about kevin bacon new study finds many of us can indeed be linked through six other people researchers the six degrees of separation theory suggests that any two people in the world are connected through a chain of no more than six social connections it was popularized by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s through his small world experiments. But is it true? Are you and I actually separated by just six connections? Well, I think what is true is Milgram's idea that we're a lot more connected than we realise. And so when people think about Milgram, they just think about the electric shock experiment, which has now been questioned in all sorts of ways. But perhaps they don't realise what a kind of innovative researcher he was. He was just this master of going around and thinking oh hold on a second there's something to be done here his idea and he sort of tested this to some extent was that if you were given a parcel and that parcel was for somebody you didn't know in another part of the country and you might be told that person's occupation all you're allowed to do is give that parcel to somebody who you think might know that person and the question is how many steps would it take before that parcel reaches the target person and he's found out the answer was around about six so we replicated it in the UK he was doing that in America so we had Katie Smith I think from Cheltenham Science Festival we had a hundred people we sent a hundred people the parcel we said you don't know Katie in Cheltenham but can you pass this on to somebody who you think will be a little bit closer to her? And the average number of steps from the parcels that made it to Katie was four, which is quite phenomenal. 100 people across the UK and within four steps, they can get this thing to a complete stranger. And it turns out there are sort of nodes. There are people that know a lot of other people. So once it hits them, they're very good at getting it to somewhere. Other people are socially isolated. Once it gets to them, that's the end of that. It doesn't go anywhere. So we did that. It was quite fun. And it's four. And along the way, we asked people how lucky they were, because I'd done quite a lot of work into luck. And what we can see from the data is that lucky people are those nodes. They're very well socially connected. And they often talk about opportunities coming their way. And you think, well, you know a lot of people. Also when you have some sort of issue in your life they going to act as social support as well So we were linking it up with the work I was doing into luck at the time Amazing experiment What amazing about this study is that out of the 100 volunteers 38 volunteers didn't send their parcel to anyone, therefore guaranteeing that those parcels would never reach Katie. Wiseman writes that the vast majority of these people had previously rated themselves as unlucky. He wanted to discover what lay behind this curious behaviour. These volunteers had gone to considerable efforts to ensure they participated in the study, but then they effectively dropped out at the first stage. So Wiseman wrote to them, he asked them, why did you not participate? And their replies were telling. The majority of these so-called unlucky people said they couldn't think of anyone on a first name term who could help deliver the parcel. As a result, from the outset, it appears that the lucky participants simply knew far more recipients for the parcels than the unlucky participants. so the lucky people were far more successful because they had more people to forward the parcel onto. Richard Wiseman concludes that these results provide substantial support for the notion that lucky people are living in a much smaller world than unlucky people. It suggests that their luck is in part due to their impressive social connections. But to test this idea, Professor Wiseman needed to run another experiment. Yeah, it came about because we're filming a TV show on luck. tonight on dateline has this scientist discovered why some people always seem to be so lucky so it's lucky people would say i see opportunities all the time unlucky people never see opportunities and we had this idea i think the day before we filmed it was one of those again uh we had a big newspaper and uh you flick through and there was you had to count the number of photographs and pictures, one, two, three, four, boring. But halfway through, two huge half-page ads. One says, stop counting. There are 53 photographs in here. And another says, tell the experimenter you've seen this and win £100. And we're nervous. We've never done this before. Here's what happened when the unlucky participant flicked through the newspaper. Caroline is asked to flip through a newspaper and count the number of photographs she spots. Caroline finishes counting pictures, but she didn't see the stop counting gag. Thanks for coming along. And here's the audio from the lucky contestant. Unlike Caroline No. 1, Caroline No. 2 quickly spots the gag, the block of words telling her to stop counting. You spotted something. Do I continue? And yes, lucky people spot those and ask for their £100, unlucky people go straight past them. and part of the theory behind that is that lucky people have got a wider attentional spotlight and so they're sort of more open to seeing stuff they don't expect to see the unlucky people very anxious very narrow spotlight they're focusing on the pictures they're counting and not seeing the bigger picture so we did that and at the end of it the director took me aside it was Dennis and I Dennis was the presenter myself, but the director took me aside. I took all this footage of Dennis laughing at people for missing opportunities. Can you give Dennis an opportunity? Finally, in our last day at Dr. Wiseman's Lucky Lab, yours truly got a lesson in navigating with eyes wide open. And again, it's all done off the top of my head. I went, we printed out a big advert that said, Hi, Dennis, say you've seen this and win $1,000. I put it on the wall in the lab. I stood there and the shot was he didn't know about it. The shot was he came up and interviewed me about missing opportunities whilst there was a massive one for him right next to me. There'll be a huge opportunity kind of staring them right in the face and they simply don't see it. It is just fascinating to see what's happening there. And after you get the gag, you say, how could they not see it? We've actually put people's names on. You know, something would be sort of, hi Dennis, spot this and win $1,000. And it could be massive on a big sheet of paper and they simply won't see it. You just don't get it. You're just blind to it. You're just blind to these sorts of opportunities. Oh! It's a lesson in luck I have to work on. I'm not only defeated, I'm humiliated! So that was a kind of icing on the cake. But it itself is based on, of course, the basketball and gorilla clip, Dan Simons, which itself is based on Uric Neisser's very similar clip with basketball. So there is a whole sort of literature of people missing big, obvious things right in front of them. And what we did was just sort of come up with a novel way of applying that for TV, really. It's time for a quick break. But when we're back, Professor Wiseman shares the time when he digitally edited a thief's face on live TV to see if it altered the viewer's perception of guilt. And Professor Wiseman also shares what happened when he hacked an ATM to give its users extra money. All of that coming up. The podcast I'd like to recommend to you today after listening to today's episode of Nudge is Success Story hosted by Scott D. Clary and it is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q&A sessions with successful business leaders in marketing, sales and it covers everything from big businesses to startups and entrepreneurship. His recent episode with Mark Manson is fantastic, do not miss it. So go and listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You're listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew, and my guest, Professor Richard Wiseman. After the success of the lying experiment with Sir Robin Day, the BBC's Tomorrow's World wanted another experiment to run on the country. Yeah, totally. I mean, Tomorrow's World kept coming back after the truth test, the one with Robin Day. And then they always wanted to have this study about criminal stereotypes and juries and it's a hard study to do because you you need to split people into two groups so so too boring about it but robin day everyone is hearing the truth and the lie and they have to decide which is which that's easy you just put it out to everyone what we wanted to do with the the study about criminal stereotyping was cut the country in half and each half the country get the same evidence but one half sees a stereotypical criminal looking defendant and the other half sees a stereotypical more angelic looking defendant well now you've got to cut the country in half that's not easy it turned out the time i don't know now turns out the time there were 13 bbc transmitters and that you could put out one program to some of them and another program to the others it's not easy to do you can patchwork the country but richard did it he and his team obtained special permission to send out different signals from the transmitters, allowing them to split Britain in two and to broadcast different programmes to each half of the country. So we made these two identical bits of ET as a judge summing up evidence and say one time we cut in a defendant who looked like the stereotype we sometimes have about criminals, the other time more angelic. I should clarify here that the difference wasn't race or ethnicity, it was attractiveness. One half of the public saw a defendant whose face was typically unattractive, he had a broken nose and close-set eyes. The other half saw a defendant who was characteristically attractive he was baby and had clear blue eyes And then we asked everyone to phone one or two numbers to say whether or not they would convict on the basis of this And what you saw was that, as you might expect, and as you say, a bit more serious, that when it was the stereotypical criminal defendant, they were convicted more frequently, even though the evidence was absolutely identical. 60,000 people called in. About 40% returned a guilty verdict for the man who just happened to fit the unattractive criminal look, while only 29% found the blue-eyed, baby-faced man guilty. Unfortunately, this bias isn't just noticeable for TV shows. Jon Stewart, a psychologist from Mercyhurst College in Arizona, spent hours sitting in courts rating the attractiveness of real defendants, and he discovered that good-looking men were given significantly lighter sentences than their equally guilty but less attractive counterparts. And this is one of the big problems with juries, is then they're ignoring evidence and making their mind up on the defendant's looks. And they can do that very quickly, and that then colours how they look at the actual evidence when it comes into play. In his book, Richard cites a really unusual experiment from Cialdini's book Influence, where convicted criminals were given plastic surgery in prison. In the late 1960s, a group of prisoners in the New York City jail were given plastic surgery to correct various facial disfigurements. Researchers discovered that these prisoners who had the plastic surgery were significantly less likely to return to prison than a control group of prisoners with uncorrected facial disfigurements. The degree of rehabilitation, such as education and training, did not seem to matter. Instead, looks appeared to be everything. So it's a lot more serious piece and more, I think, worthwhile and interesting piece because it's very hard to do studies with the general public under those circumstances but this allowed us to do that. Continuing on this serious theme I asked Richard about a study he ran that involved hacking ATMs to dish out more money than the user had asked for. We had an ATM which when people walked past it it just gave them £10 note it kind of just shot out and the question was how many people would take it into the bank and the answer was very very few so most people held on to it. Two-thirds of the subjects kept the cash. Some returned several times to make the most of the opportunity. And the most dishonest participant returned 20 times. And then we did actually one of my favourite things, which was took over a supermarket. And people were given too much money as change. So if they paid with a 10, they were given change for a 20. And the first few people all kept the change. Then we thought maybe they hadn't noticed. So we had the cashier count the money in. that makes 10 and 10 is 20. Most people kept it. And then we had the cashier say, oh, sorry, did you give me 10 or 20? And most people said, I gave you 20. So huge amounts of dishonesty amongst the British public in a huge supermarket. When we did the same thing around the corner, corner shop, first thing everyone did was give the money back. So it shows you dishonesty is a social construct that they can be dishonest to a supermarket. That's a huge organisation. in their mind i'm sure they think oh they're not going to miss that money corner shop very very different and then i think while we're doing all of this we had the idea of as people came out there should be a market researcher on the street and they ask about favorite type of cheese or whatever it was and then say if you're given too much money in the supermarket would you give it back and we just seen them take the money and most people who took the money said of course i would give it back. So it actually speaks to another point, which is that often we can't trust what people will tell us about how they'll behave. We have to see how they'll actually behave in a real world situation. Currently, psychologists love, I'm guilty of this myself, having people online ticking boxes to say, oh yes, I'm an honest person or whatever it is. The truth is that we need to observe them in the real world to find out how they would actually behave, because we can't always trust what they say. Richard writes how the findings presented a fascinating but depressing view of human nature. Unethical behaviour is alive and well in modern day Britain. Although the vast majority of people claim to be upstanding citizens, most of us are capable of dishonesty if the situation is right. That's a little too depressing to end the episode on. So to sum up today's show, I asked Richard to share one of his favourite studies from his 35 years studying human psychology it's a test he ran when he launched his book quirkology when quirkology came out i'm quite proud of this study we came up with two different covers each of them had a woman on the front but in one of them we enlarged the pupil size and they were randomly stacked in books and boxes that went out to bookshops and so you got your book you bought your book and then right at the back it said or can you take part in an experiment you came online you said what color the box was at the back of the book and that told us whether you got the small pupils one of the large ones told us whether you're male or female and we found that more males had picked up the enlarged pupil version but didn't know they'd done that but why would a woman's enlarged pupils make men more likely to buy well richard writes how people's pupils tend to become larger when they see something or somebody that appeals to them and because we tend to like people who like us People with enlarged pupils are often seen as especially attractive. This signal is subtle, but the effect is powerful. It's been known for a long time. During the 17th century, Venetian women would place an extract of the plant belladonna, which contains a toxin that dilates the pupil, into their eyes. They would place that in their eyes to appear more attractive. This unusual practice explains the origin of the plant's name, belladonna, which means beautiful lady in Italian. The toxin would also have the side effect of making the Venetian women's vision somewhat blurry, which could be the reason we have the expression, love is blind. And it was again an example of trying to figure out a method which actually measures behaviour. And in that instance, we did it, it had quite a big impact on buying behaviour without people realising why. so all these things uh it's always the to me is is the challenge is coming up with a simple fun doable thing in the real world and unfortunately that's quite rare in psychology if you have enjoyed richard's appearance on today's episode of nudge i promise you you will love his books i've left links to both of his books in the show notes but if you're a bloke you might want to avoid looking at the cover you wouldn't want to be persuaded by someone's pupils after all. Anyway, I'll be back next Monday for another episode of Nudge. But if you want more behavioural science principles before then, consider subscribing to my Friday newsletter. Each week, I spend 18 hours scouring behavioural science journals and books to find a tip worth sharing. I share things about marketing psychology, about pricing, about branding and about psychology tips like we've covered today. To sign up, just go to nudgepodcast.com. That is nudgepodcast.com and click newsletter in the menu. It's totally free and you can go and read all of the past articles whenever you like. That's all from me. I've been your host, Phil Agnew. Thank you so much for listening. Cheers.
