Timothy R. Levine

Distinguished Professor & Chair of Communication Studies, University of Alabama at Birmingham

My expertise involves the topics of lying and deception, truth-default theory, interpersonal communication skills, credibility assessment & enhancement, interrogation, persuasion/influence, and social scientific research methods. 

Student, media, speaking, consulting, and expert witness inquiries are welcome.

NSF Truth and Lie Video Collection

With the help of funding by the National Science Foundation (SBE0725685), we created a video library of truthful and deceptive interviews for use in academic research.

Brief synopsis: Each tape contains an interview with subject who had just completed a trivia game for a cash prize with a partner who was an experimental confederate. All were provided the opportunity to cheat. The choices to cheat or not and to lie or not were left up to the subjects. Ground truth about the occurrence of cheating is known for certain, all cheating and lying are unsanctioned, do not reflect instruction-following, and the stakes are presumably high (money is at stake, cheating in a university setting is a punishable offense, the cheating occurred in federally funded research). The tapes vary in duration, transparency, and in the questions asked.

Use: The videos can be obtained from me free of charge for use in legitimate academic research subject to the following conditions:

The videos are identifiable human subjects data and must be treated as such.

The videos may be used in basic academic research only, and my not be redistributed, shared, or made public. The tapes may not be used in any commercial or for profit activity.

The tapes must be stored in a secure way (password protected).

All research using the video must be IRB / human subjects approved.

Graduate students using the videos for student research must have responsible faculty supervision.

Any publication or presentation of research using the tapes must provide citation to the tapes origin.

Citation Information:

Levine, T.R. (2007-2011). NSF funded cheating tape interviews. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University.

Publications using various versions of the tapes include:

Ali, M., & Levine, T. R. (2008). The language of truthful and deceptive denials and confessions. Communication Reports, 21, 82-91.

Blair, J. P., Levine, T. R., & Shaw, A. S. (2010). Content in context improves deception detection accuracy.  Human Communication Research, 36, 420-439. 

Kim, R. K., & Levine, T. R. (2011). The effect of suspicion on deception detection accuracy: Optimal level or opposing effects. Communication Reports, 24, 51-62.

Levine, T. R., Kim, R. K., & Blair, J. P. (2010). (In)accuracy at detecting true and false confessions and denials: An initial test of a projected motive model of veracity judgments. Human Communication Research, 36, 81-101.

Levine, T. R., Kim, R. K., & Hamel, L. M. (2010). People Lie for a Reason: An Experimental Test of the Principle of Veracity. Communication Research Reports, 27, 271-285.

Levine, T. R., Serota, K. B., & Shulman, H. (2010). The impact of Lie to Me on viewers’ actual ability to detect deception. Communication Research, 37, 847-856.

Levine, T. R., Shaw, A., & Shulman, H. (2010a). Assessing deception detection accuracy with dichotomous truth-lie judgments and continuous scaling: Are people really more accurate when honesty is scaled? Communication Research Reports, 27, 112-122.

Levine, T. R., Shaw, A., & Shulman, H. (2010b). Increasing deception detection accuracy with direct questioning. Human Communication Research, 36, 216-231

Levine, T. R., Serota, K. B. Shulman, H., Clare, D. D., Park, H. S., Shaw, A. S., Shim, J. C., & Lee, J. H. (2011). Sender demeanor: Individual differences in sender believability have a powerful impact on deception detection judgments. Human Communication Research, 37, 377-403.

Levine, T. R., Shulman, H., Carpenter, C., & DeAndrea, D. C. (2013). The impact of accusatory, non-accusatory, bait, and false evidence questioning on deception detection. Communication Research Reports, 30, 169-174.

 

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