Research Highlights (older stuff)
My primary program of research focuses on deception and deception detection. My current ideas on the topic are integrated in a view I call Truth Default Theory. However, my research interests are diverse. This page provides a sample of some of my research including some of my most widely known works and some of my personal favorites. Links are provided for key articles.
Relationship Closeness • Jayson Dibble, Hee Sun Park and I created and validated a scale to measure relationship closeness across relationship types. The scale performs really well, and is free for use in all academic research.
Honest Demeanor • There are large individual differences in the appearance of sincerity. Some people tend to be believed by virtually everyone. Other people provoke suspicion in others. The thing is, how sincere a person comes off has little to do with how sincere they appear to others. Our work on honest demeanor shows how the appearance of honesty generalizes across audiences and even cultures. We also identify and cross validate 11 indicators of a sincere self-presentation that function as a gestalt. The honest demeanor index is copyrighted and propriety. It may be used only with my permission. Contact me if interested.
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.
Verbal Aggressiveness and Argumentativeness Scales • Michael Beatty, Mike Kotowski and I have a series of studies on the Infante et al. verbal aggressiveness and argumentativeness scales. Our findings are that the VAS is multidimensional and the ARG scale is unidimensional. Both scales tend to correlate much more highly with self-reported communication than observed aggressive or argumentative behavior.
Friends with Benefits • My MA student, Melissa Bisson, did her thesis on friends with benefits. It was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior and received media coverage in the New York Times.
Lie Acceptability Scale • Want to measure individual differences in lie acceptability? Here you will find a scale and the validation research. It is free for use in all academic research.
Fear Appeals in Africa / Equivalence Testing • Nythia Muthusamy did her dissertation (under my direction) on the use of fear arousing messages to promote HIV prevention in Africa. She pointed out that theoretically, fear appeals should not work under conditions of high levels of pre-existing fear. This is just what she found. The study also involves the first ever use of equivalence testing in a major communication journal.
Involvement & Persuasion • Involvement is clearly an important variable in persuasion, but its role and its effects are not always clear. In Social Judgment Theory involvement increases resistance to persuasion while in dual process theories like ELM involvement facilitates the effectiveness of strong argument. Hee Sun Park thought that persuasion type (attitude change vs. attitude creation) might be a moderator. We designed an experiment investing persuasion type and involvement types (outcome vs. value relevant) under conditions of strong and weak argument. To our surprise, argument strength ruled the day.
NHST • I have become interested in the history, logic, and social practice of statistical inference in the social sciences. This led me to essays providing a critique of modern significance testing, advice on best practices, a meta-meta-analysis documenting a negative correlation between sample size and effect size that I argue stems from confirmation bias, and a defense of publishing non-significant findings.
Placebo Control Experiments • Placebo control experiments are unusual in communication research. I have done two that are pretty cool. The first, Levine et al., 2005, tested the effects of training in nonverbal cues on deception detection accuracy against both placebo and no training controls. The placebo produced improvements equivalent in magnitude to the average improvement from nonverbal training in meta-analysis. The second experiment (Duff et al.) tested various treatments for communication apprehension against a creative placebo (thanks to Michael Beatty for the idea). The placebo led to as good or better outcomes as the treatments.
Norms vs. Expectations • One of my personal favorite experiments used an experiment to un-confound the effects of norms and expectations. Usually, of course, we expect normative behavior and non-normative actions are also unexpected. Nevertheless, norms and expectations are conceptually and empirically distinct.
Norms and Culture as Multi-level Constructs • Some important social scientific ideas are inherently extra-individual in nature and cannot be adequately understood or studied at the level of the individual. I have recently argued that both norms (Shulman & Levine) and culture (Park et al.) are like this. Both reflect convergence among aggregates of people.
Some other noteworthy papers of mine: