What the World’s ‘Best Chat-Up Line’ Reveals About Human Psychology

Summary

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Nudge Podcast Summary

Episode: "What the World’s ‘Best Chat-Up Line’ Reveals About Human Psychology"

Host: Phil Agnew
Guest: Professor Richard Wiseman
Date: April 13, 2026

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Episode Overview

This lively episode of Nudge dives into the surprising quirks of human psychology, as revealed by classic and contemporary behavioral experiments. Host Phil Agnew is joined by the ever-entertaining Professor Richard Wiseman—a psychologist, author, and expert in uncovering the hidden logic behind chance, persuasion, and everyday oddities. Together, they discuss what the world’s “best chat-up line” reveals about how to connect with others, the pratfall effect’s role in likability (even among saleswomen and AI!), how to actually get your lost wallet returned, and why paying people to do good deeds can backfire. The episode is packed with memorable studies, actionable insights, and Wiseman’s signature blend of wit and science.

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Key Topics and Insights

1. The Power of Self-Perception: Why Rewards Sometimes Backfire

[03:04–06:59]

• Self-Perception Theory: Based on Daryl Bem's work, this theory explains that people deduce their own emotions and preferences by observing their behavior, just as they do when judging others.

  • Quote:

    "If you want to cheer yourself up, force your face into a smile and there's some evidence that works."
    — Prof. Richard Wiseman [03:21]

• BBC Litter Study: Participants were paid either £10 or £2 to pick up litter. Paradoxically, those paid more reported enjoying the task far less.

  • Phil Agnew explains:

    "The average enjoyment rating of the handsomely paid £10 group was a measly 2 out of 10, while the modestly paid £2 group had an average rating of 8.5 out of 10." [06:47]

• Key Insight: Over-rewarding for inherently positive or neutral activities can undermine intrinsic motivation. People infer, “If I’m paid a lot, it must be unpleasant; if not, maybe I like it after all.”

2. The Pratfall Effect: Why Human Flaws Make Us More Likable

[07:26–11:30]

• Pratfall Effect Introduction: Rooted in a 1966 study by Elliot Aronson, this is the idea that small blunders—like spilling coffee—make competent people more likable.

  • Wiseman on social psychology’s ‘golden age’:

    "There's something about [perfection] we don't like... We warm to people who make mistakes, like we all do." [08:35]

• Demo in a Shopping Centre: Two product demonstrators—one flawless, one a bit clumsy—showed that customers actually preferred and trusted the flawed performer.

  • Phil Agnew:

    "Although the public tended to find Sarah's demonstration more professional and convincing, it was Emma who topped the likability scale... People said that they found it difficult to identify with Sarah's flawless performance, but warmed to Emma's more human display." [10:37]

• Timing with AI: Wiseman jokes that AI, being too perfect, might also benefit from a touch of (simulated) human error in the future.

3. The Helping Hand: Clumsiness and Cooperation

[11:49–13:10]

• Supermarket Pratfall Experiment: A shop assistant (Jack) deliberately drops a carton of milk and asks a customer for help—with endearing results.

  • Customer’s Response: Rated Jack 9 out of 10 for friendliness and helpfulness—despite doing most of the helping herself, not him!

  • Quote:

    "Appearing clumsy probably made Jack more likable, and that made the customer more willing to help him."
    — Phil Agnew [13:10]

4. How to Get Your Wallet Returned: The Lost Wallet Study

[13:34–18:44]

• Background: Inspired by Wiseman’s own near-miss with a lost wallet, he investigates which items inside a wallet maximally increase the odds of it being returned to its owner.
• Classic Study by Hornstein: Positive vs. negative notes in ‘found’ wallets impact the likelihood of their return.
• Wiseman’s Experimental Setup:
  • 240 wallets, each containing identical items except for one variation: a photo of a baby, a puppy, a family, a charity card, or nothing (control).
  • The surprising result: Wallets with a baby photo were returned far more often than any other variant.
    • Key Stats (Phil Agnew [18:07]):
      • Control: 6%
      • Charity card: 8%
      • Elderly couple: 11%
      • Puppy: 19%
      • Family: 21%
      • Baby: 35%
• Wiseman’s Reflection:

  "...in that wallet, there is a picture of a baby. I have no children, so I put it in there as a safeguard to increase the chances of getting my wallet returned." [18:44]

• Key Insight: Cute vulnerability (babies) evokes a stronger protective/returning instinct in strangers than even signals of charity or family.

5. What’s the World’s Best Chat-Up Line?

[20:11–22:32]

• Speed Dating Study: Wiseman and team analyzed which opening lines led to the most follow-up dates during speed-dating.
• What Doesn’t Work: Clichéd (“Do you come here often?”) or overtly braggy lines underperformed.
• What Does Work: Unusual, open-ended questions that encourage fun, offbeat self-expression.
  • Wiseman explains the best performer:

    "...our top line in terms of getting somebody interested was if you're going to be a pizza topping, what kind of pizza topping would you be? And that's a very open question. You can't answer yes or no. It's probably not a question you've had before and it probably is going to be the catalyst for a silly, fun conversation." [21:16]

• Carnegie Connection: Inspired by Dale Carnegie’s classic advice to display genuine interest in the other person.

6. Beyond Lines: The ‘Game’ Advantage

[23:17–24:36]

• Wiseman’s Observational Insight: In an unpublished experiment, playing simple games (like making a silly badge about each other) was even more successful than conversation-only interactions at breaking the ice during first meetings.
  • Quote:

    "People love doing it. They found out a lot about the other person in a fun, sort of non-pressured way. ... The big problem was stopping people playing those games." — Prof. Richard Wiseman [23:17]

• Key Insight: Shared playful activity trumps formulaic conversation—removing pressure, making people feel connected faster and more naturally.

7. Linking the Experiments: The Power of Counterintuitive Psychological Triggers

[24:36–End]

• Summary Reflections (Phil Agnew):
  • Payment can undermine enjoyment of otherwise neutral/good activities.
  • Revealing minor flaws builds likability and trust.
  • The best persuasion often lies not in statements, but in creative, open-ended questions.
  • The expected “obvious” solutions—like charity cards for wallets—aren’t always the most effective.

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Notable Quotes

• On Self-Perception Theory:

  “They look at themselves and go, actually, you paid me a large amount of money, I must not have enjoyed it.”
  — Prof. Richard Wiseman [05:58]

• On the Pratfall Effect and Likeability:

  “We warm to people who make mistakes, like we all do.”
  — Prof. Richard Wiseman [08:35]

• On the Winning Chat-Up Line:

  “If you’re going to be a pizza topping, what kind of pizza topping would you be?”
  — Prof. Richard Wiseman [21:16]

• On Creativity in Conversation:

  “You'll make more friends in two minutes by being interested in them than 20 years of trying to get them interested in you... Now the word I've missed out actually in that which really matters is genuinely, genuinely interested in them.”
  — Prof. Richard Wiseman (paraphrasing Dale Carnegie) [21:16]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction and Guest Background: [00:02–02:38]
• Self-Perception Theory & Litter Experiment: [03:04–06:59]
• The Pratfall Effect & Shopping Centre Demo: [07:26–11:30]
• Supermarket Prattfall Helping Experiment: [11:49–13:10]
• Wallet Return Study: [13:34–18:44]
• Speed Dating & Chat-Up Line Study: [20:11–22:32]
• Games vs. Conversation in Meeting New People: [23:17–24:36]
• Episode Summary & Broader Insights: [24:36–End]

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Final Thoughts

This episode spotlights how subtle changes in questioning, presentation, and even the contents of your wallet can radically alter how people respond to you. Whether you’re looking to create more persuasive marketing, improve customer service, or simply return a lost item to its owner, these experiments remind us: human psychology often works in counterintuitive, surprising ways.

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Transcript

[Phil Agnew]

Today's guest on Nudge is internationally renowned for his eye opening studies into human psychology.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

Psychologist and paranormal investigator, Professor Richard Wiseman. Professor Richard Wiseman has also called for

[Phil Agnew]

them to be regulated by law.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

Well, joining me now is the man who studied these principles, the principles of good and bad luck, Professor Richard Wiseman.

[Phil Agnew]

He's a best selling author, winner of the Royal Society's David attenborough award in 2023 and he's Britain's only professor of the understanding of psychology. At the University of Hertfordshire, he studied why people feel drunk off non alcoholic booze, what picture to put in your wallet to stop it from getting nicked, and famously the world's best chat up line.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

So we went out, we did several speed dating sessions, experimental ones. We asked people what they had asked, what they chatted about and then whether or not they wanted to see the partner again. And that allowed us to sort of zero in, as it were. I think our top line in terms of getting somebody interested was hear that line and more.

[Phil Agnew]

In today's episode of Nudge. 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. And I'm incredibly excited to be joined today by Professor Richard White.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

I am a psychologist. I started my working life as a magician many, many years ago. Read a book on psychology, which was Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends and Influence People and it all sounded rather interesting. So I switched from doing magic to psychology, 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.

[Phil Agnew]

In today's episode, Richard walks me through some of his most noteworthy studies. We'll hear why accidents can make shopping center saleswomen Seem more persuasive how thieves are deterred by one specific photo and even this incredibly persuasive apparently Chat upline But first I asked Richard about a study that Richard ran for the BBC where participants were forced to pick up litter in their local park.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

So the study you're talking about was carried out with People Watchers where we did about 80 studies for this huge BBC program.

[Phil Agnew]

These are the People Watchers, a team of doctors and psychologists who will explain human behavior using hidden camera experiments.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

And it was about self perception theory, which I've always been fascinated by, actually co created by a man called Daryl Bem, who is better known in psychology because he's a kind of controversial figure within what's called parapsychology, psychology of the paranormal. But Daryl, before he did that stuff, was doing self perception theory. And this is the idea that when you decide how you think and behave, you look at your own behavior. So when we decide how somebody else behaves, we look at their behavior. We think, is this person happy? Well, they're smiling so they seem to be happy. We look at behavior and we infer emotion. And his idea was we do the same to ourselves. We look at ourselves and we think, well, am I smiling? Because if I'm smiling, I'm probably happy. And what flows from that very simple idea is a kind of radical way of changing things because it means if you want to cheer yourself up, force your face into a smile and there's some evidence that works. So how does that then play out when it comes to picking up litter in the park or anything which is a little bit more complicated than smiling? Well, if there was something that was really awful that you really hated doing, I'd have to pay you a large amount of money to do it. And if you enjoyed doing it, maybe I wouldn't pay you very much money at all. In fact, you might even pay me.

[Phil Agnew]

Many believe that the most effective way to encourage behaviour is to reward someone for that behaviour, to pay them. However, Mark Lepper in his well known 1973 paper studied this. Wiseman cites it in his book Writing How Lepper asked two groups of school children to have fun creating some drawings. However, before being allowed to play with the crayons and paper, one group of school children were told that they would receive an elaborate good player medal for drawing, that is a reward. While the other group was not promised any reward, they just were told to play with the drawings. A few weeks later, the researchers returned, handed out drawing paper and crayons to both groups and they measured how much each of the groups played with the paper and crayons. Surprisingly, the children who had received the medals on the first occasion spent significantly less time drawing than their classmates did. Why does this happen? Well, according to Lepper, the children reasoned that adults only reward things that kids don't enjoy. They think, if I'm getting rewarded for drawing, then I must not like drawing. And Professor Wiseman wondered if the same was true for the adults in the littering study.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

So if it comes to picking up litter in the park, people don't really enjoy that. And what we did was to split people into two groups and I think we paid about £10 to one group and said, there you go, go and pick up some litter. Here's ten pounds. We said to the other group, here's two pounds, go and pick up some litter. Then we said, how much did you enjoy picking up the litter? And according to Darryl, according to self perception theory, they should look at their behaviour and go, hold on a second, I was paid £10. I must hate picking up litter. It must be the most awful thing ever versus the two pound group that go, well, I don't mind it so much because I did it for a fairly small sum of money. And that's what we found that actually paying people to do something often undermines their motivation. They look at themselves and go, actually, you paid me a large amount of money, I must not have enjoyed it.

[Phil Agnew]

The average enjoyment rating of the handsomely paid £10 group was a measly 2 out of 10, while the modestly paid £2 group had an average rating of 8.5 out of 10.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

So that was really taking this idea, self perception theory, it can be applied to many, many things that when you reward people for doing something, yes, they'll do that thing, but the moment you remove that reward, they'll stop doing it and they'll look back and go, I only did it for the reward. It must be the sort of thing I don't enjoy doing. And we had it play out in parks. We're picking up litter, which is rather a fun televisual way of doing it. But that was that sort of sat at the core of that study.

[Phil Agnew]

Professor Wiseman has also studied a lot of different effects, including the pratful effect. And he did this for the BBC program People Watchers. Now, the pratful effect, as many of you will know, because I talk about it incessantly on this podcast, it originates from a 1966 study by Elliot Aronson here, as Wiseman writes in his Book participants were asked to listen to one of two audio tapes. Both tapes detailed a student's participation in a general knowledge quiz, followed by that student talking about his background. The student performed very well on the quiz, answering more than 90% of the questions correctly, and then he modestly admitted to a lifetime of success. However, in one of the two variants, towards the end of the recording, the participants heard that successful student knock over a cup of coffee and thereby ruin his new suit. All of the participants, those who heard the coffee spill and those who didn't, were then asked to rate how likeable they found the student. Despite the only difference between the tapes being the fictitious knocking of the coffee, the student who had committed the blunder was considered far more likable. And Richard Wiseman loved citing this study.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

Yeah, I mean, and we should say when I was putting those books together, the reason why I was citing so much study, so many studies from the 50s and 60s and so on, was not because that was the only books I had around me, it was because that's when social psychologists used to do really interesting stuff. And nowadays there's a kind of move away from that. And in fact I've just written something for psychologists about psychology facing a sort of dullness crisis. So I'm a big fan of that. What might be seen as old school social psychology. And the study you're talking about, Pratville idea that if somebody is too perfect, too glossy, although the evidence obviously is they're very competent, there's something about it we don't like. There's something that just feels it's not human. We warm to people who make mistakes, like we all do.

[Phil Agnew]

But Aronson's study is now 60 years old. Is it still relevant today? Well, that's what Richard attempted to find out.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

So we did. It was a fun thing to do. We went to a shopping centre and we took over one of those booths where they kind of demonstrate products and then ask people to buy them. What we did was with sort of food mix, liquidizers basically. So you put in, I don't know, different sorts of fruits and you can make a smoothie, something like that. And we thought that would be good for the pratfall effect because when those things go wrong, it's very, very messy. And so we had two people, it was Sarah and Emma, I think two of our presenters. Sarah did a pretty pitch perfect demonstration of the device. Everyone went, oh my goodness, that's incredible, it looks fun. Then up comes Emma and she tries to demonstrate the liquidizer and it Just goes horribly wrong. This thing goes everywhere, but she battles her way through. We can see it's a good product, but we also warm to her because we think, oh, you poor thing. Look, you're obviously not very competent, but my goodness, you're trying. And actually you battled your way through. Well done, you. And then we said to people in the audience who'd seen one of those two demonstrations, what do you think?

[Phil Agnew]

The results back up exactly what Aronson found 60 years prior. Professor Wiseman writes that although the public tended to find Sarah's demonstration more professional and convincing, it was Emma who topped the likability scale. When asked to explain their decision, people said that they found it difficult, difficult to identify with Sarah's flawless performance, but warmed to Emma's more human display.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

People really warmed to Emma. Sarah was just too competent. And so actually, in terms of sales and so on, Emma would have done a little bit better than Sarah. And I was thinking about it the other day. It's funny you should mention it. With AI often, it's really perfect. And my feeling is, as we go forward, we may need to build some humanity into AI. We may have to see it making mistakes and correcting itself in order that we warm to it now.

[Phil Agnew]

I couldn't find a clip of this episode of People Watchers. It's actually infuriatingly difficult to find clips from BBC shows that are no longer on the iplayer. But I did find a similar sort of prattful, inspired experiment on a different episode of People Watchers, which was also run by Wiseman and his team. Here's the clip.

[Narrator/Producer]

Earlier in the week, Jack posed as an inept shop assistant for the experiment.

[Phil Agnew]

Jack, the shop assistant reveals a flaw. He drops a box of milk right in front of a real life customer. Here's Jack dropping that milk and asking the customer for help.

[Jack (Shop Assistant)]

I've got to go and serve some of you. Would you mind, like, just finish this off for me and bring it over. It's my first. I don't want to get in trouble.

[Narrator/Producer]

Okay.

[Jack (Shop Assistant)]

Yeah.

[Phil Agnew]

Jack leaves and the customer stays behind to clean up all this milk. The mess that he had made. It seems that the weakness had made him more likable. Perhaps it made the customer more willing to help him. But that's not all. He had another request for that customer.

[Jack (Shop Assistant)]

This is going to sound ridiculously cheap, but could I ask one more favor? Just down the corner, down that corridor on the right, on the deep freeze, there's a few cans of, like, cat food. My bringing it over.

[Narrator/Producer]

So she helped Jack out twice in the space of a few minutes, even though it was Jack's job. Let's ask her what she thought of him. So first of all, staff helpfulness. 9, 9 out of 10.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

And staff friendliness.

[Phil Agnew]

9.

[Narrator/Producer]

She awarded him a whopping 9 out of 10 for helpfulness, even though it was her doing most of the helping.

[Phil Agnew]

Appearing clumsy probably made Jack more likeable, and that made the customer more willing to help him. But sometimes you need help from someone you can't talk to. Like, if you lose your wallet, you want the person who finds your wallet to return the wallet to you. But how can you convince them if you can't speak to them? Well, Richard Wiseman has studied this with the wallet study.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

I think the origin of that I might be wrong, but I think the origin was that I lost my wallet. I and I didn't lose it for very long. So I've never lost my wallet permanently. So I think I lost, I left it in a cafe or something and somebody very kindly tracked me down and gave me my wallet back. And like a good social psych, a human, a regular human would go, thank you very much, and put the wallet in their pocket. And that's that. Social psychologists go, hmm, hold on a sec. What can I learn from this? How could this be the catalyst of a study? And I thought, what should people be putting into their wallet and purses to maximize the chance of getting them returned? And then it turns out there is actually a history of wallet dropping studies in social psychology that I didn't know about. And basically you vary the contents of the wallet, you drop the wallets, there's a return address in each one. How many did you get returned back to you?

[Phil Agnew]

Psychologist Harvey Hornstein from Columbia is one of those researchers who systematically studied wallet dropping for years. In one study, which Wiseman writes about in 59 seconds, Hornstein examined whether people would be more likely to return a wallet if it elicited positive rather than negative feelings. This experiment involved creating a kind of unusual scenario. And the scenario was to give the impression that the wallet had been lost not just once, but twice. According to this scenario, the original owner had lost his wallet and then someone else had found it, attached a short note, placed it in an envelope addressed to the original owner, and then on the way to the mailbox, this well intentioned finder had inadvertently dropped the envelope on the street and thus lost the wallet a second time. Those who unknowingly took part in Hornstein's experiment came across an unsealed envelope containing a wallet with a note wrapped around the wallet and had to decide whether to post the envelope back to the original owner or or not. Now, here's the interesting part of the experiment. Half of the notes included in the parcel sounded very positive. They read, it has been a pleasure to help someone and I have really enjoyed it. It's been no problem at all. While the others, the other notes, they were far more negative. They read, I was really quite annoyed at having to return this wallet and I really hope you appreciate all this effort that I've gone through. So did that difference in wording have an effect? Well, yes, it did almost finish. Just 40% of the wallets with the positive notes were returned, whereas just 12% of those with negative notes were returned. But wrapping your wallet in a return parcel attached to a positive note just in case you lose it is totally impractical. No one will do that. So Richard Wiseman set about finding a simpler way to get someone to return your wallet.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

So my one was very, very simple. We had, I think it was four groups of wallets, all had the same things in terms of return address and cash and so on.

[Phil Agnew]

Richard had two hundred and forty wallets in total, and he split them into four groups. Each group had a different picture added inside the wallet.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

But then we had a picture of a baby. In one, we had a cute puppy picture, not obviously a real puppy. In another, we had a sort of mature family photo and we had a charity card. Those were the four main ones.

[Phil Agnew]

I think in addition to those four groups, there was a final batch of wallets that were also lost, but no pictures were included in the site. Those wallets, they acted as the control. Wiseman went out, dropped the 240 wallets, and you'd think this would be quite easy, but it's actually surprisingly hard.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

So the first few days was me dropping a wallet, and within seconds there's somebody tapping you on the shoulder saying, oh, you've dropped your wallet. And you go, no, put it back. This is science I'm trying to do here. So it's surprisingly hard to drop a wallet. And then you realize if it's too close to a letterbox or a bin or a police station, that's not going to work. You know, we need to sort of make certain these are randomly dropped all over the place. And so we had to sort of come up with a system for randomly dropping wallets in a way that you didn't get them returned to you within 30 seconds. It wasn't easy. We have suffered for our psychology and Then you sit at home and you wait for your wallets to come back. And the clear winner, and I think it was about 20% higher than the others, was the baby. Putting that picture of a baby in your wallet was very, very helpful.

[Phil Agnew]

Within a week, 42% of the wallets were returned. Of the wallets that made it back, just 6% were from the control group with no picture, only 8%, this surprised me, contained the charity card. The results from the wallets containing a photo of an elderly couple, a cute puppy, or the happy family were slightly more impressive, with return rates of 11%, 19% and 21%. However, the winning wallets with results far better than the rest, were those which contained the photo of the smiling baby taking first place with a really impressive 35% return rate.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

And so I haven't got my wallet to hand. It's in the next room, but in that wallet, there is a picture of a baby. I have no children, so I put it in there as a safeguard to increase the chances of getting my wallet returned. And the theory was. We never tested the theory. The theory was it kind of kicked off paternal instincts. It was sort of a cute baby picture. And strangely, my money was on the puppy. I thought surely that would work, but actually the baby outdid it by about 20%.

[Phil Agnew]

So if you want someone to enjoy a task, probably don't pay them. If you want someone to like you, reveal the flaw. And if you want your lost wallet returned, include a picture of the baby inside your wallet. But we're not done yet. What is the scientifically proven best line to use on a speed date? We'll find out after the break. Hello, and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Speed dating is rather simple. You meet a series of complete strangers face to face. Each encounter lasts just a few minutes, during which you have to decide whether you ever want to see your date again. Wiseman in his book, writes how it was apparently invented in the late 1990s by an American rabbi as a way to help Jewish singles find partners. The idea rapidly spread from one community to another, and at the time, it represented one of the most popular ways to meet potential soulmates. But it is not as popular today as it was around the mid 2000s.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

I guess. I don't know if people still do speed dating. It was huge when we did those studies. Everyone was doing it. And, you know, it could be that with all good social psychology, you know, the results become trapped in time. I have no idea whether or not this would replicate. But so we went out, we did several speed dating sessions, experimental ones. We asked people what they had asked, what they chatted about and then whether or not they wanted to see the partner again. And that allowed us to sort of zero in, as it were, on the most effective lines.

[Phil Agnew]

Alongside James Horan and Caroline Watt, Richard was able to see the least desirable chat up lines. He writes that the lines which obtained the fewest follow up dates from the evening tended to employ these sort of old standard lines like, do you come here often? Or they struggled to impress with comments like, oh, I have a PhD in commuting. Those lines didn't do very well at all. The best lines, however, they got their dates to talk about themselves in a fun, offbeat manner, something Dale Carnegie had written about years earlier.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

And you're right, it does get back to Carnegie, because Carnegie's central premise, or one of them, is that you'll make more friends in two minutes by being interested in them than 20 years of trying to get them interested in you. That's one of his. Now the word I've missed out actually in that which really matters is genuinely, genuinely interested in them. He's not arguing for faking it, he's arguing about, you know, getting a genuine interest in others. So with the speed dating stuff, I think our top line in terms of getting somebody interested was if you're going to be a pizza topping, what kind of pizza topping would you be? And that's a very open question. You can't answer yes or no. It's probably not a question you've had before and it probably is going to be the catalyst for a silly, fun conversation. Or if somebody wants to take it a bit more seriously, they can do. And some people did want to move away from small talk pretty quickly in speed dating because you're always being asked the same kind of questions again and again. So anything which was an open question like that that got the person to talk about themselves in an unusual way scored very highly. So that seemed to be the key to it.

[Phil Agnew]

What pizza topping would you be? That line encouraged people to open up. It was different to the bland questions that most speed daters were asked again and again. And it got people to talk about themselves in a creative and unusual way. But this advice is probably not very helpful for any of you listening who want to find a partner or to make new friends. Partly because very few people still speed date, but also because if you have heard this line before, if you'd heard that what's your favourite pizza topping is A very successful line. You've read about it in the book or perhaps on this podcast. You won't think, oh, that's such a novel question. You'll just think, oh, my partner stole that from a book. And, well, that's quite a turn off, probably. So for a more reliable option, Professor Wiseman suggests this.

[Professor Richard Wiseman]

We also did some, which I haven't written up, which we had people, rather than speed date, we had them play games. And that was way more successful than speed dating. So the way it would work is you had to. We gave everyone some badge making equipment, like a little blank badge and some pens, and you had to find out the person's name and one thing about themselves. Maybe it was their hobby, maybe they were into horses or something and represent their name and that on the badge. So you'd write, you know their name and draw a horse and then you swap badges and that's the badge you wear for the rest of the session. Well, it's some of the worst drawings I've ever seen in my life. But people love doing it. They found out a lot about the other person in a fun, sort of non pressured way. And I can remember those studies, the big problem was stopping people playing those games. In speed dating, after three minutes, or whatever it is, you ring the bell, everyone stops. It didn't happen here. People want to carry on and on. So I think that's another, you know, from a social, psychological perspective. You think there's a lot of pressure on a speed date, but you play a game, you know, draw something and send it psychically to the person opposite. That's all just silly and fun and people loved it.

[Phil Agnew]

Richard Wiseman's studies tackle specific how to get people to pick up litter, how to stop people stealing your wallet, and even how to persuade a partner to come on a second date. But these specific questions reveal wider findings about psychology. The litter study reveals that payment for a service decreases the intrinsic motivation behind that service. We could pay people to donate blood, but if we did, fewer people would probably want to do it. The wallet study reveals that counterintuitive solutions can work. You'd assume that the charity card would have the best results. Surely someone who donates to charity is more deserving than a young parent. After all, there are more young parents than there are charity donators. But that was not the case. And the speed dating study reveals something important about questions. All too often we think that the best way to persuade is to share a fact or a statement. But I think this shows that questions can work far better. A political ad which states vote for JF Kennedy is almost certainly going to be ignored. However, a picture of his presidential opponent, Nixon, that says would you buy a used car from this man? Well, that question is incredibly persuasive. Questions persuaded even silly questions about pizza toppings. That is all from me today, folks. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Nudge. And thank you to Professor Richard Wiseman for joining me on the show. He is not only a great podcast guest, he really is a fantastic author. His book 59 Seconds is one of the best books I've read in years. I really enjoyed it. I couldn't put it down. I have no idea how I've missed it for this song because it's been out for a while and it's incredibly popular. But it was great. And if you are like me and you haven't had a chance to read this book, then head to the Show Notes. I've left a link to the book there. And if books aren't for you but you want to learn more from Richard, head to the Show Notes because there's a link to Richard's substack there so you can get his newsletter as well. Both his books and his emails are worth a read. That is all from me, folks. Thank you for listening. I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge, and in a few weeks Richard Wiseman will join me again on the show and this time we'll cover his quest to find the funniest joke of all time. Don't miss it. Bye bye.