'Quirkology' Uncovers Science Behind Life's Quirks

Psychologist Richard Wiseman examines the quirky science of everyday life in his book "Quirkology: How We Discover the Big Truths in Small Things."

Richard Wiseman uncovers the science of everyday life in his book.

(Amazon)

Some of the book's highlights include questions like how a surname influences a person's life, why incompetent politicians win elections and what's the best chat-up line.

Wiseman has spent more than 20 years examining life's quirky science and has even conducted experiments in more than 30 countries.

Read an excerpt of "Quirkology" below.

I have long been fascinated by the quirky side of human behavior. When I was a psychology undergraduate, one of my very first experiments involved standing for hours in London's King's Cross railroad station looking for people meeting partners who had just gotten off a train. The moment they were locked in a passionate embrace, I would walk up to them, trigger a hidden stopwatch in a my pocket, and ask, "Excuse me, do you mind taking part in a psychology experiment? How many seconds have passed since I just said the words, 'excuse me'?" After querying around fifty such couples, I discovered that people greatly underestimate the passing of time when they are in love, or, as Albert Einstein once said, "Sit with a beautiful woman for an hour and it seems like a minute, sit on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour -- that's relativity."

An interest in the more unusual aspects of psychology has continued throughout my career. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I traveled north to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and spent four years working on a doctorate examining the psychology of deception. Once that was completed, I accepted an academic position at the University of Hertfordshire, and set up my own research unit to examine unusual areas of psychology. I am not the first academic to be fascinated by this approach to examining behavior. Each generation of scientists has produced a small number of researchers who have investigated the strange and unusual.