Timothy Levine

• COMM 3443 – Deception

Professor Levine’s teaching and research interests include deception, interpersonal communication, persuasion and social influence, experimental research design, measurement validation, and statistical conclusions validity. He has published more than 160 journal articles. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and Department of Justice and has received press coverage from New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, NBC, CNN, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic. His book, Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception, published in 2020 by the University of Alabama Press, details his 30-year program of research on deception leading to the development and testing of Truth-Default Theory.

Levine, T. R., & Shebib, S. J. (2025). Understanding Human Communication: Why Communication is Important and How to be Good at It. Cognella. (First Edition). 

Levine, T. R. (2024). The relative frequency of true and false confessions and denials in an experimental paradigm designed to investigate deception detection. Communication Studies, 75, 362-376. doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2023.2285014

Levine, T. R., & Markowitz, D. M. (2024). The role of theory in researching and understanding human communication. Human Communication Research, 50, 15-27. https://doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqad037.

Serota, K. B., Levine, T. R., Zvi, L., Markowitz, D. M., & Docan-Morgan, T. (2024). The ubiquity of long-tail lie distributions: seven studies from five continents. Journal of Communication, 74, 1-11, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqad040.

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. doi.org/10.1177/1745691621990369

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. doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2021.1985153

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. doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2021.1977354

Levine, T. R. (2020). Duped: Truth-Default Theory and the Social Science of Lying and Deception. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.

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. doi.org/10.1093/hcr/hqz019

Levine, T. R. (2018a). Ecological validity and deception detection research design Communication Methods and Measures, 12, 45-54.

Levine, T. R. (2018b). Scientific evidence and cue theories in deception research: Reconciling findings from meta-analyses and primary experiments. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2461-2479. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/7838