Richard Wiseman is a British psychologist who holds a chair in the public understanding of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire and who worked as a professional magician before taking up research. That combination has shaped his work: he has run tests of psychic claims under conditions designed by someone who knows how a trick is built, and he has studied the ordinary psychology, of attention, expectation and memory, that makes such claims persuasive. With Julie Milton he published the 1999 meta-analysis that found no overall effect across thirty ganzfeld studies conducted after the autoganzfeld series, and with Stuart Ritchie and Christopher French he reported three failed replications of Daryl Bem's retroactive recall experiments in 2012. He was one of the investigators in the televised 2004 test of the claimed diagnostic vision of Natasha Demkina. He is a living person described here from his published work.
Facts
Disputed
Test ResultRay Hyman's Testing Natasha (Skeptical Inquirer, 2005) reviewed a controlled test of a claimed case of anomalous animal perception, in which the subject scored four correct results out of seven trials. Hyman's statistical method compared that result against both the chance expectation for the task and the specific success criterion both the proponent and the sceptical investigators had agreed in advance would count as a positive result. Four of seven trials correct is above chance expectation but below the pre-agreed criterion for success, and each side has read that same ambiguous outcome differently, one crediting it as suggestive despite falling short of the bar, the other treating the pre-agreed criterion as decisive and the result as a failure to meet it. Test Result DetailRay Hyman's Testing Natasha (Skeptical Inquirer, 2005) records the pre-agreed protocol of the 2004 televised test of Natasha Demkina's claimed diagnostic vision, designed jointly by Hyman, Andrew Skolnick and Richard Wiseman, the British psychologist and former professional magician who was one of the investigators: Demkina was asked to match seven volunteers to their real medical conditions, with a threshold of five correct matches out of seven agreed in advance, and Hyman's own account records she achieved four, below the threshold both sides had accepted before the test began. 3 Notable PublicationThe 1999 meta-analysis with Julie Milton finding no overall effect across thirty ganzfeld studies conducted after the autoganzfeld series 1 Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman's Does Psi Exist? Lack of Replication of an Anomalous Process of Information Transfer (Psychological Bulletin, 1999) statistically pooled thirty ganzfeld telepathy studies conducted after Bem and Honorton's original 1994 meta-analysis and found no overall effect across them. A later pooling by Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio, covering studies from 1992 to 2008 using a different set of inclusion criteria, reported a positive effect across that period; the two research teams disagree specifically about which individual studies should be included in a meta-analytic pool at all, a methodological dispute that accounts for much of why their conclusions differ from the same broad body of underlying research. Life
Lifespan or Floruit Origins
Place of OriginLuton, Bedfordshire, England 2 Learn More
The Magician Who Went into the Data
Wiseman occupies an unusual position: trained as a conjuror before he was trained as a psychologist, he has done most of his critical work not by exposing tricks but by re-analysing published literature. The 1999 meta-analysis he published with Julie Milton is the clearest example. Taking thirty ganzfeld studies conducted after the autoganzfeld series that Charles Honorton had reported, they found no significant overall effect, which was the first substantial answer to the claim that the protocol had become reliably replicable. Proponents responded that the sample included studies departing from the standard protocol and that a later pooling by Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio in 2010, covering 1992 to 2008, did find an effect; the disagreement is about which studies belong in the pool, and it has not been settled.
In 2012 Wiseman published, with Stuart Ritchie and Christopher French, three failed direct replications of Daryl Bem's retroactive recall experiments, and the group's difficulty in placing a null result became a case study in the publication-bias reforms that followed. What distinguishes this body of work from ordinary debunking is that it is conducted in the currency the field itself uses. A meta-analysis can be answered with another meta-analysis, and it has been, repeatedly, which is why the ganzfeld argument has stayed alive rather than ending in mutual dismissal.
Testing People, and the Experimenter Effect Problem
Wiseman has also run direct tests of individual claimants, most publicly the 2004 examination of Natasha Demkina, a young Russian woman who said she could see inside bodies and diagnose conditions. The test, designed with Ray Hyman and the physician Andrew Skolnick and filmed for television, set a threshold in advance: she was asked to match seven medical conditions to seven volunteers and needed five correct to proceed to a fuller study. She got four. Both sides then disputed what that meant, since four of seven is well above the chance expectation for the task while below the criterion everyone had accepted beforehand, and the episode is a useful illustration of why pre-specified thresholds are difficult to hold to once a result arrives.
A more subtle strand of his work concerns the experimenter effect: in a series of joint studies with the parapsychologist Marilyn Schlitz, the same protocol run in the same laboratory produced positive results when she was the experimenter and null results when he was. Neither of them has offered a settled explanation, and the finding cuts both ways, since it could indicate subtle procedural differences or something about expectation that neither side's theory handles well.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Conducted
One of the three investigators. Documented in the published accounts of the test.
Critiqued
Daryl Bem, Historical Figures Wiseman, with Ritchie and French, reported three failed direct replications of the 2011 retroactive recall experiments. The failures to replicate are published and are not disputed as facts; Bem disputes the inference drawn from them.
Feeling the Future, Studies Co-author, with Ritchie and French, of three failed direct replications published in 2012. The failures are published and undisputed as facts.
Parapsychology, Disciplines Richard Wiseman, a psychologist who trained as a professional magician, published a widely cited 1999 meta-analysis with Julie Milton of thirty ganzfeld telepathy studies conducted after the original autoganzfeld series, and found no overall evidence of the claimed effect. His critique rests on two things a magician's training supplies that a scientist's does not, a working sense of how a psychic demonstration can be faked, and an interest in the ordinary psychology of attention and memory that makes such claims feel convincing.
This edge names the critic rather than a contested claim in its own right. The Autoganzfeld Series' own replication-status fact already carries the 1999 Milton and Wiseman meta-analysis finding no significant overall effect, in full.
Why this is disputed. The 1999 Milton and Wiseman meta-analysis pooled thirty post-autoganzfeld studies run after the 1994 Bem and Honorton report and found no overall effect above chance, directly contesting the earlier finding the protocol had been designed to confirm. Proponents including Bem and Dean Radin have argued the pooled studies were methodologically too heterogeneous to combine fairly and that later, more tightly standardized series again reported above-chance results, so whether the 1999 null result settled the question or was itself methodologically contestable remains argued on both sides.
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