What’s New with Tim (Jan. 2025)
My big news is that I joined the faculty at University of Oklahoma (OU) after a decade at UAB. As of Jan 1, 2025, I am the new Dept. Chair of Communication at OU.
Reader’s of Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers continue to find me. Truth-default theory and my work on demeanor helped inspire Gladwell’s book. If you are interested, a good starting point is Gladwell’s podcast: Revisionist History, Season 4, “The Queen of Cuba” episode where I appear at about minute 31.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/the-queen-of-cuba
Some sample other podcast appearances and YouTube videos are:
· With Malika Dudley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhNn6wFRCBc or
https://soundcloud.com/user-602105250/6-lying-and-deception-have-you
· Saltcube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAgE_O8q_w4
· People who read people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oua9kAUl1YU
· https://candourpodcast.com/dr-timothy-levine/
· https://www.mishcon.com/news/podcasts/dishonesty-uncovered-episode-1-truth-default-theory
U.S Representative George Santos has brought substantial media attention to Kim Serota and my work on prolific liars. Our work investigating how often people lie continues. Recently, we have tracked people’s reports of lying over time and we continued to test the few prolific liars curve in additional countries, cultures, and languages.
Our latest is on prolific lying is: Serota et al. (2024). The ubiquity of long-tail lie distributions: Seven studies from five continents. Jounrla of Communication, 74, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqad040
The Serota et al. (2022) lying over time study has sparked much interest and generated an altmetric score over 400.
Serota, K. B., Levine, T. R., & Docan-Morgan, T. (2022). Unpacking variation in lie prevalence: Prolific liars, bad lie days, or both? Communication Monographs, 89, 307-331. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2021.1985153
The Lee et al. (2021) paper tested the projected motive module from truth-default theory in art forgery scandals in Korea.
Lee, S. A., Park, H. S., & Levine, T. R. (2021). Judgments of honest and deceptive communication in art forgery controversies: Two field studies testing truth-default theory’s projected motive model in Korea. Asian Journal of Communication, 31, 536-549. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2021.1977354
I have updated Truth-default Theory:
A brief op-ed: https://iai.tv/articles/when-to-believe-lies-auid-2434
For more academic audiences:
Levine, T. R. (2022). Truth-default theory and the psychology of lying and deception detection. Current Opinion in Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101380
Levine, T. R. (2022). Content, context, cues, and demeanor in deception detection. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.988040
Of course, my book Duped remains the go-to source for truth-default theory.
Here are a few additional relatively new works that might be of interest:
Levine, T. R., & Street, C.N.H. (2024). Lie-truth judgments: Adaptive lie detector and truth-default theory compared and contrasted. Communication Theory, 34, 143-153. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtae008
Levine, T. R., Daiku, Y, & Masip, J. (2022). The number of senders and total judgments matter more than sample size in deception-detection experiments. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17, 191-204. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691621990369
Levine, T. R., Punyanunt-Carter, N. M., & Moore, A, (2021). The truth-default and video clips: Testing the limits of credulity. Communication Studies, 72, 133-145. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2020.1833357
Levine, T. R., & Weber, R. (2020). Unresolved heterogeneity in meta-analysis: Combined construct invalidity, confounding, and other challenges to understanding mean effect sizes. Human Communication Research, 46, 343-354. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqz019
Updated Jan. 19, 2025