On choosing a research question: Curiosity, anomalies, and the road less travelled

I was recently invited to write a book that both explains why psychology matters and aims to inspire the next generation of psychologists. I decided to focus on topics that are frequently neglected in introductory texts and that I wished I had known about when I was an undergraduate. Rather than present an overly glossy or simplistic view of psychology, I examined how we really go about our work and why we do what we do. What makes for relevant and meaningful research? Can psychology really improve lives and make the world a better place? How do we deal with the ambiguities and complexities associated with studying the mind? How do our own beliefs and preconceptions influence our work?

Whilst working on the book I became fascinated by how we choose our research questions. This issue attracts surprisingly little attention, with psychology textbooks and courses usually presenting detailed descriptions of methods but little about what makes for an interesting question in the first place. I am not the first to notice the problem. In the 1970s, William McGuire remarked 'Our methods courses concentrate heavily on procedures for testing hypotheses and largely ignore procedures for generating them'.

In my experience, the most traditional approach (and the one that students are often encouraged to adopt) involves reading around an area and formulating an idea based on previous work. On the upside, treading in the footsteps of others is logical, helps to build a body of knowledge and likely to result in studies using well-established methodologies. On the downside, this traditional approach runs the risk of straitjacketing thinking, reinforcing existing perspectives and preconceptions, and hindering innovative. Curious about alternative strategies to formulating research questions, I explored the story behind many well-known and ground-breaking studies. Several interesting ideas quickly emerged.

First, some researchers were influenced by their lived experience. For example, in the 1940s, Mamie and Kenneth Clark's experience of racism played a key role in them investigating how segregation lowered children's sense of self-worth, and much more recently, Greta Defeyter's first-hand experience of poverty caused her to examine food insecurity and how school breakfast clubs boost academic performance. In a similar vein, others were motivated by a personal interest. For example, Elizabeth Loftus' research into eyewitness testimony came about, in part, because of her fascination with courtroom dramas and books about true crime. Similarly, my colleague Peter Lovatt has studied the psychology of dance because he has worked as a professional dancer, and I have examined why people are fooled by magic tricks because I am a magician.

Second, several innovative studies were initiated by a curious experience or observation. When Solomon Asch was eight years old, his grandmother poured a glass of wine during a family religious ceremony and declared that the prophet Elijah would take a sip. Asch thought that he saw the level of the wine decrease, and in later life described how this strange experience were a catalyst for his now classic experiments into social conformity and perception. Similarly, when Leon Festinger was researching the psychology of rumour, he discovered that the survivors of a major earthquake had subsequently spread rumours suggesting that there were more disasters to come. In trying to explain this unusual behaviour, Festinger speculated that the survivors had generated the rumours to justify feeling scared, and this research set the stage for his hugely influential work on cognitive dissonance. Finally, Richard Gregory described how a member of his research team once walked past a café in Bristol and happened to notice that the building's ceramic tiles created a striking optical illusion. Curious, Gregory and his team subsequently carried out several studies into the unusual design (now known as the Café Wall Illusion).

Third, some researchers have been inspired by unexpected events and serendipity. For example, in the 1970s, Ulric Neisser showed participants a film in which a woman holding an open umbrella walked through a group of basketball players, and discovered that many of the participants failed to see the incongruous woman. In the 1990s, Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris decided to remake Neisser's film. By chance, one of their team had just conducted a study in which they had to dress up as a gorilla and suggested replacing the umbrella-holding woman with a person wearing a gorilla suit.The resulting video went viral, inspired several highly cited studies and is now shown in psychology classes across the world. Similarly, in the 1980s, perceptual psychologist Peter Thompson wanted to create an image that appeared different when viewed close-up and at a distance. He obtained a photograph of Margaret Thatcher, cut out her eyes and mouth, turned them upside down and pasted them back in the photograph. When Thompson returned to the room, he happened to view the doctored photograph upside down and realised that the image of Thatcher appeared normal. Thompson went on to study the illusion and the compelling effect has helped to further our understanding of facial perception.

"None of this work was motivated by the traditional approach of following in the footsteps of others."

Fourth, some researchers have set out to test a somewhat strange idea and inadvertently made an important discovery. For example, the German psychiatrist Hans Berger believed that he was in telepathic contact with his sister and spent years trying to create apparatus that could detect thoughts leaving the brain. He didn't manage to prove the existence of telepathy but instead invented the EEG machine. Similarly, in the late 1950s, Tony Cornell wanted to find out how people would respond if they came face to face with a ghost. To find out, he dressed up in a large white sheet, ran around various locations in Cambridge and discovered that most people failed to notice him. Cornell's somewhat unorthodox study is now widely considered to be the first experiment into inattentional blindness.  

Finally, other times psychologists have drawn analogies with work outside of their area (e.g., persuasion researchers adopting a vaccine model to explore whether people can be 'inoculated' against certain arguments) or been inspired by claims that are widely believed by the public (e.g., testing the notion that students have certain learning styles). 

None of this work was motivated by the traditional approach of following in the footsteps of others. Of course, having formed a research question, it's vital that researchers are aware of past work in the area, but that's quite different to being driven by that work in the first place.

In my opinion, creating a research culture that is more open to these alternative approaches, and incorporating them into books and courses on methodology, is likely to result in work that is innovative, interesting, and meaningful. Because of this, there is a pressing need to develop effective ways of encouraging researchers to reflect on their lived experiences and personal interests, to seek out curious real-world phenomena, to focus on unexpected findings and chance happenings, to investigate unusual and unorthodox areas, to look for analogies with other fields, to test popular claims, and much more. This shift may prove challenging, but I believe that it's vital to the future of psychology.

• Richard Wiseman is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and has recently written Psychology: Why It Matters (Polity Books).