Richard Wiseman
Richard Wiseman is a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire who has conducted research across psychology of the paranormal, parapsychology, magic, and related areas.
Academic work and collaborations
Wiseman has published on belief in the paranormal, psychology of luck, and parapsychology [1]. Much of his parapsychology work has involved collaboration with Caroline A. Watt, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh [2][3][4][5]. Together they have investigated topics including remote viewing [5], perceptual phenomena [2][4], and the psychology of belief [1].
Wiseman has also engaged directly with core parapsychology questions. For example, Wiseman and Watt conducted a mass-participation remote viewing study using Twitter, finding no significant relationship between participants’ belief in psychic ability and accuracy on remote viewing trials across four trials [5].
Experimenter effects in parapsychology
Wiseman is centrally featured in the ESP-Nexus account of experimenter effects in parapsychology research. He participated in a landmark collaborative program with parapsychologist Marilyn J. Schlitz on remote staring detection — a paradigm testing whether the human autonomic nervous system responds to covert observation. In joint studies using identical protocols, Schlitz’s participants showed statistically significant electrodermal responses during remote staring periods, while Wiseman’s participants did not, presenting a candidate experimenter-effect pattern. This divergence occurred despite simultaneous data collection at the same location with the same equipment and participant pool. A formal replication of the joint study reproduced the same pattern. A later third collaborative study, however, failed to replicate the earlier experimenter-effect pattern, leaving the interpretation unresolved.
This Schlitz–Wiseman program is documented on ESP-Nexus as one of the few systematic, multi-study skeptic–proponent collaborations in parapsychology’s history.
For deeper context on this collaboration and its methodological implications, see the pages on experimenter effects in parapsychology research and remote staring detection and autonomic nervous system activation.
References
- Wiseman, R., Collver, J., Worth, R., & Watt, C. A. (2021). Hocus Pocus: using comics to promote skepticism about the paranormal. Journal of Science Communication, 20, A04-A04. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.20020204
- Wiseman, R., & Watt, C. A. (2015). And now for something completely different: Inattentional blindness during a Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch. I-Perception, 6, 38–40.
- Wiseman, R., Watt, C. A., Brinke, L. t., & Porter, S. (2012). The Eyes Don’t Have It: Lie Detection and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. PLoS…, 7, e40259-e40259. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0040259
- Wiseman, R., & Watt, C. A. (2010). Judging a book by its cover: The unconscious influence of pupil size on consumer choice. Perception, 39, 1417–1419.
- Wiseman, R., & Watt, C. A. (2010). Research brief: “ Twitter ” as a new research tool: Proof of principle with a mass participation test of remote viewing. European Journal of Parapsychology.
More questions answered
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