Paul Seager

Dr. Paul Seager is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, and has been teaching social psychology for over fifteen years. Originally, before deciding to change careers to the field of psychology, Paul worked as a computer analyst / programmer. He attended the University of Essex as a mature student gaining a first class degree in psychology in 1996. Paul then went on to study for his PhD at the University of Hertfordshire, (completed in 2001) looking at ways to improve lie detection accuracy.

He is an expert in the area of social influence and social engineering, and is especially interested in how con artists use social psychology to dupe their victims. He has recently (2018) contributed to Santander's 'Scam Avoidance School'. Paul is also an expert in the area of deception detection, and has, over the years, appeared on many radio and TV programmes talking about the subject (various BBC national and local radio contributions e.g. Radio 2 (Chris Evans) and Radio 5 (Simon Mayo), and ‘The Real Hustle’ on BBC3). He has also contributed to many Radio 4 programmes.

Paul is the co-author of three books in the areas of lie detection (‘Would I Lie to You’), moving house (‘Upping Sticks’), and parenting (‘Surviving the Terrible Teens’), and regularly participates in public engagement events to help with the public understanding of psychology, the most recent of these being held at the Natural History Museum in London (2014). He has also written a series of articles linking psychology and poker for ‘Poker Player’ magazine.

His latest book, "Social Psychology: A Complete Introduction", was published by Hodder on November 28th 2014. Paul has also contributed to the Hogg & Vaughan (2018) Social Psychology enhanced e-book.