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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Serie: Why It Matters
- Sprache: Englisch
You are remarkable: You experience a vast range of thoughts and feelings, including falling in love, remembering last Tuesday, and contemplating the meaning of life. And you can carry all sorts of astonishing behaviours, such as sauntering down the street, singing in falsetto and riding a unicycle. Psychologists study every aspect of how you think, feel, and behave.
Richard Wiseman takes you on a personal journey into this fascinating world, focusing on what makes for meaningful research. He explores how psychology reveals the hidden workings of the mind, boosts critical thinking, debunks myths, improves lives, and informs debates in politics, philosophy, and education. This insider’s guide lifts the lid on how psychologists go about their work, examines contemporary challenges associated with studying the mind, and encourages students and researchers to reflect on why they do what they do.
If you’ve ever wanted to think like a psychologist, spot a liar, uncover the truth about happiness, or discover how to create a more altruistic society, then this book is for you.
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Seitenzahl: 140
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 How Does Your Mind Really Work?
Looking at Observation
Beliefs, Opinions, and Decisions
To Help or Not to Help, That Is the Question
Why Psychology Matters: How Your Mind Really Works
Notes
2 A Unique Toolkit
Starting Out
Heading to the High Street
Going Undercover
Back Home
Not So Fast
Why Psychology Matters: A Unique Toolkit
Notes
3 Myth Busting
Would I Lie to You?
Written in the Stars
The Myth of Memory
Perfect You
Why Psychology Matters: Myth Busting
Notes
4 Informing and Resolving Debate
Into the Twilight Zone
Who Do You Think You Are?
Perchance to Dream
Shocking Science
In Two Minds
The Power of Mindsets
Why Psychology Matters: Informing and Resolving Debate
Notes
5 Creating a Better World
Exploring Mental Health Issues
All Together Now
Tackling Prejudice
Find Me
Positive Psychology
Sustainability
Why Psychology Matters: Creating a Better World
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
Further Reading
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Further Reading
End User License Agreement
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Polity’sWhy It Mattersseries
In these short and lively books, world-leading thinkers make the case for the importance of their subjects and aim to inspire a new generation of students.
Helen Beebee & Michael Rush, Philosophy
Nick Couldry, Media
Robert Eaglestone, Literature
Andrew Gamble, Politics
Lynn Hunt, History
Tim Ingold, Anthropology
Katrin Kohl, Modern Languages
Neville Morley, Classics
Alexander B. Murphy, Geography
Geoffrey K. Pullum, Linguistics
Michael Schudson, Journalism
Ann B. Stahl, Archaeology
Graham Ward, Theology and Religion
Richard Wiseman, Psychology
Psychology
Why It Matters
Richard Wiseman
polity
Copyright © Richard Wiseman 2022
The right of Richard Wiseman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5044-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933000
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many people who have provided information and helpful insights during the writing of this book: Geoffrey Dean, Greta Defeyter, Cara Flanagan, Mike Gazzaniga, Jules P. Harrell, Leonard Jason, Rob Jenkins, Helen Keen, Emma Ladds, Peter Lamont, Elizabeth Loftus, Peter Lovatt, Lois MacCullagh, Gabriele Oettingen, Adrian Owen, Richard Philpot, Stephen Reicher, Chris Skurka, Effua E. Sosoo, Kimberley Wade, Caroline Watt, David Yeager, and Sally Zlotowitz. In addition, special thanks to my wonderful editor, Pascal Porcheron, and the team at Polity.
Introduction
During my childhood, I used to regularly visit my grandfather. Although most of the trips were pleasant but uneventful, one of our meetings had a profound influence on my life. I was around eight years old, and my grandfather and I were enjoying a cup of tea in his living room. He handed me a black marker pen and a Victorian penny, and asked me to write my initials on the coin. My grandfather then placed the penny in the palm of his hand and closed his fingers around the coin. A few moments later, he whispered a magic word and then slowly opened his hand to reveal that the coin had disappeared. Next, he reached under his chair and took out a metal box that was about the size of a deck of cards. The lid of the box was held securely in place with several rubber bands. My grandfather handed over the box and asked me to open it. I removed the bands and opened the box, only to discover a slightly smaller metal box that was also sealed with several more rubber bands. Once again, I removed the bands and carefully opened the second box. This time I found a little green cloth bag. I looked inside the bag and, to my amazement, discovered my initialled penny.
I became hooked on conjuring and spent a lot of my youth reading as much about the topic as possible. By my early teens, I was performing magic on a regular basis and wanted to become a professional prestidigitator. However, as time went on, my plans began to change. A good magician needs to understand how audiences perceive the world. This involves knowing the type of events that capture people’s attention, when and why they become suspicious, and how to ensure that certain parts of a performance vanish from their memories. The more I examined these topics, the more I became fascinated with the human mind.
I eventually went to University College London to study for an undergraduate degree in psychology. Towards the end of my time there, I happened to walk past a poster that caught my attention. Professor Robert Morris from the University of Edinburgh was carrying out work into psychics and mediums, and he wanted a Ph.D. student to investigate the psychology of deception. I successfully applied for the position, travelled up to Scotland and spent the next four years investigating magic, belief and the paranormal. After being awarded my doctorate, I was offered a lectureship in the Psychology Department at the University of Hertfordshire. I have been at the university ever since and am now a Professor of Psychology. During this time, I have researched a variety of areas, including the psychology of illusion, luck, conjuring, the paranormal, and lying. And all because my grandfather once showed me an amazing magic trick.
That’s enough about me, let’s talk about you. You are remarkable. Like most people, you can experience a vast range of thoughts and emotions, including falling in love, planning a holiday, feeling happy, becoming jealous, remembering last Tuesday, listening to music, contemplating the meaning of life, adding up a column of numbers, deciding what to order in a restaurant, dreaming, and reading overly long sentences like this one. You are also capable of carrying out an amazingly wide variety of behaviours, including walking along the street, juggling, singing a song, preparing breakfast, painting a picture, dancing until the small hours, riding a bicycle, yawning, sneezing, kissing, helping others, falling asleep, and laughing. Not only that, but you are the only person just like you in the entire world.
Psychologists have spent many years investigating this cornucopia of thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. Their work has been described in many different types of books. Textbooks have presented broad-brush overviews of vast swathes of research, academic monographs have outlined specific areas in considerable detail, popular books have provided accessible accounts of especially interesting ideas and findings, and self-help texts have offered pragmatic tips and techniques that aim to improve lives. This book adopts a somewhat different perspective and asks one of the most important questions of all: why does psychology matter?
In my experience, this is not an issue that is widely discussed in psychology. Students often learn about psychological methods and knowledge without reflecting on whether this work is meaningful. Similarly, academic psychologists are busy people, and sometimes rush from one project to another without thinking about whether, and how, their work matters. This book is an opportunity to take a breath, slow down and reflect on why psychologists do what they do.
Like any author, I am biased. I have devoted my entire career to researching, teaching, and promoting psychology, and this book is based on my experiences and presents my point of view. I should also say that I don’t think that all psychology matters. In fact, some of the work is irrelevant, unimportant, and even harmful. However, when psychology is at its best, I believe that it is hugely meaningful. Each of the following chapters explores a different reason why I think that psychology matters and describes research projects that illustrate the diversity of work in that area. There is a vast body of potential research to choose from, and I have selected examples that I find especially compelling, interesting, uplifting, or impactful. In the conclusion, I will offer some practical suggestions for promoting even more meaningful work in the future.
I hope that you enjoy our time together.
1How Does Your Mind Really Work?
Computers, washing machines and vaccum cleaners all arrive with manuals. Unfortunately, we aren’t born with a guide to our mind and so we have to figure out what makes us tick. Over the years, psychologists have challenged many of our most cherished intuitions and common-sense ideas about how our minds work, and often discovered that we are more remarkable than we ordinarily imagine. In this chapter, we will explore several examples of this surprising, interesting, and counter-intuitive work. Along the way, we will encounter people dressed as gorillas and ghosts, discover what happened when people tried to remember 10,000 photographs, find out why psychologists have staged hundreds of mock accidents, and much more.
Looking at Observation
Most people believe that they are good observers and that they would instantly spot a striking event happening right in front of them. However, psychologists have discovered that there’s far more to vision than meets the eye.
British researcher Tony Cornell, who was interested in the possible existence of ghosts, decided to find out what would happen if people came face to face with a seemingly supernatural spectre. In one study, Cornell dressed up in a white sheet and strolled down a path near a busy city centre. Amazingly, almost no one seemed to spot his ghostly figure. In another piece of research, Cornell visited his local cinema, put on his ghost costume, waited until a film was showing and then walked out in front of the screen. He then asked the audience if they had noticed anything strange and discovered that around a third of them had completely missed his apparitional appearance.1
In the 1970s, Ulric Neisser and colleagues conducted more systematic research into people’s inability to see what’s happening in front of them. Neisser created a short film containing two teams of people.2 Each team consisted of three individuals, with those in one team wearing white tee-shirts and those in the other team wearing black tee-shirts. Each of the teams had their own basketball and during the film the players in each team constantly passed their basketball between one another. A few minutes into the film, a woman wearing a long black raincoat and carrying an open umbrella walked across the scene and through the players. Neisser showed the film to people and asked them to count the number of times that the players dressed in the white tee-shirts passed their basketball between one another. Amazingly, most people failed to spot the woman with the umbrella.
In the 1990s, Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris made several versions of Neisser’s classic film and replaced the umbrella-holding woman with other unexpected events.3 A member of their research team had recently conducted another experiment in which they had dressed up in a gorilla costume, and so in one of the films they put on the costume and walked through the basketball players. As a bonus, they even paused in the middle of the scene and beat their chest at the camera. Simons showed the film to people and asked them to count how many times the team wearing white tee-shirts passed their basketball. In line with Neisser’s previous findings, around half of them failed to spot the gorilla.
Simons uploaded his wonderful gorilla film onto the internet, and it quickly became a viral hit. Inspired by both this work and my background in magic, I created a short online video called ‘The Colour Changing Card Trick’. This film involved two people performing a card trick on a table. During the trick, the performers changed the colour of the tablecloth, their clothing, and the curtain behind them. Amazingly, most people watching the film fail to spot these changes. In another dramatic illustration of our ability to miss what is happening in front of our eyes, researchers discovered that students talking on a mobile telephone even failed to notice a clown riding past on a unicycle!4
These studies have helped psychologists to understand more about the innermost workings of our visual system. According to one model of perception, processing all the incoming information from our surroundings would quickly overwhelm our visual system. Instead, our mind automatically and unconsciously focuses attention on what appears to be important. This process usually works well and allows us to gain an accurate impression of what is happening around us. However, under certain circumstances, this process can cause us to miss the unexpected. When we are watching a film in a cinema, we don’t expect to see a ghost walk in front of the screen. When we are asked to count the number of times people pass a basketball on a video, we are not looking out for someone dressed as a gorilla. And when we watch a card trick, we do not pay attention to the colour of the tablecloth, the performers’ clothing, or the curtains. At one level, missing these striking events illustrates that our common-sense understanding of observation is deeply wrong. However, at another level, it demonstrates just how amazing and sophisticated our minds really are.
TOTAL RECALL
In the 1970s, Lionel Standing conducted a remarkable study into the power of memory. Standing persuaded five volunteers to spend several days looking at 10,000 photographs. The volunteers only saw each image for five seconds. To discover how many images they had remembered, the volunteers were shown several hundred photographs, and asked to identify the ones that they have seen in the earlier part of the study. Using this information, Standing estimated that the volunteers had remembered around 6,600 photographs, despite having only seen each of them for a few seconds. Similar work by Rob Jenkins and colleagues
