Uncover Duped: Truth-Default Theory And The Social Science Of Lying And Deception Narrated By Timothy R. Levine Available In Physical Edition

was good. Learned some key knowledge on lying,

All together, though, it was pretty underwhelming

/I MASSIVELY enjoyed this book and now that I am making a career pivot to related topics may try to get in touch with the author to see where they are on the ingroup / outgroup replication.
He and I share a surname now, in fact, but is of no relation to my spouse's family that I know of.
Communicating is hard. Even when all parties are wellintentioned, even oneonone and facetoface within one's tribe, conveying and receiving our thoughts can be unreliable.
The older I get the more I consider communicating the single biggest challenge we face as humans, Adding lies to the problem does not helpexcept in making the problem more interesting,

I'm really conflicted about this book, I picked it up as a followup to Malcolm Gladwell's sitelinkTalking to Strangers, in large part because lying has been such a clusterfucking part of ourlives one that will not magically cease inbut we're all hoping for a big damper.
I got a lot more than I bargained for and really feel like talking this whole book through with someone.
Unfortunately for you, dear reader who can't converse with me in real time, what you're going to get is a monologue.


Levine gets a lot of it right at least "right" by my standards as someone who is old and has lived among humans.
Deception research to date has been asking the wrong questions: lies told by/to college students in a lab setting are not representative nor even interesting.
Lies are only useful in the context of patterns, of relationships of all types, He gets this also gets that lying is rare, that there are no universal tells, no magic signal like "wiggling the nose three times means subject is lying".
He gets and proves that there are good liars, slick con artists and the like, and there are awful flustery ones, and the huge majority of us somewhere in between.
More interestingly, he makes a strong case that individual affect/demeanor skew an observer's interpretation of the person's honesty: this is what Gladwell focuses on in his book.
Levine shows thatas the majority of us already

knowlies are seldom caught in the act: that we need fact checkers.


Unfortunately, there's much that Levine doesn't address: the fact that, for a significant portion of the U.
S. population, lies simply don't matter, That tens of millions of shitty citizens simply don't care about truth or facts, He doesn't address religion, nor how one can expect people to understand facts when they're told from childhood that an invisible skygod is obsessively and unhealthily watching them and particularly what they do with their genitalia.
Then again, he teaches at U, Alabama. He probably can't even come close to that topic, He never once cites sitelinkFukuyama nor sitelinkHarari, nor does he even mention game theory or Bayesian probability except indirectly and briefly.
In fact his whole treatment of probability made me uncomfortable: he uses the word "average" often, and IMHO that word should never appear in a scientific publication.
Near the end of the book he admits that his statistics background is limited,

More unfortunately, he comes off as a dick, The first third of the book is devoted to addressing the state of deception research, which would be fine if he didn't get snarky and defensive.
Not always, not even often, but enough for me to find unpleasant, He also lauds his own research as "groundbreaking", "transformative", with "huge implications", Let someone else say that, dude, He misspells Danny Kahneman's name only once, but still, Absolutely worst of all, completely unforgivable in my book: he introduces a "Believability Quotient", relating to a subject's demeanor, then in a footnote asserts it as "proprietary", "copyrighted", and usable by others "only with prior written permission".
That's not how science works: that's a greedy scam artist move, I have to admit that after that, I read the rest of the book with some scorn and much less interest, which is a shame because there were still good aspects to it.


I think Truth Default Theory has much going for it, I think Levine has valuable insights and research, I even liked many aspects of this book: I just can't recommend it to anyone, We'll need to be patient, If the science pans out, others will write presumably less obnoxious books about it, Or, even better, it will become a takenforgranted part of our lives, And if the science doesn't pan out, we'll hear no more, That's how science works. Unless youre someone where deception detection is a major part of your career or life such as a detective, HR manager, school faculty etc, this book may not be for everyone.
Personally, deception detection has absolutely nothing to do with my career or life, and this is one of the best books Ive read about the subject.
Part of my interest in this subject is because Im baffled at how many people believe socalled body language experts, but theres also a major issue with our criminal justice system when it comes to lie detecting.
Timothy R. Levine managed to sell me on the fact that hes one of the top deception researchers, and its crazy because Ive never heard of him.
But what makes this book so good

Levine starts the book by explaining how this research topic piqued his interest, which was some CIA agents wrote a book about lie detection, but they werent even good at it.
The author then goes through some of the most cited deception research from notable psychologists like Paul Eckman, and Levine explains the flaws in these studies and methods thoroughly.
What I love about Levine is that hes a huge advocate for proper scientific research and falsifiability, In this book, youll learn about the countless study Levine and his partners have conducted on deception detection, and youll also learn about some of the nuances we never think about when it comes to assessing whether or not someone is lying.
Again, this book is really research heavy, but if this is a subject relevant to your life or youre interested in it, its probably one of the best books out there on the topic.

I enjoyed this book, but it went into too much academic detail, as Levine warned in his introduction.
Still, scanning through the chapters, I found more than I got from Malcolm Gladwell's "Talking To Strangers", which was based mainly on this book.


For an overview of TruthDefault with more examples, read or listen to Gladwell, the story teller's take, but this one will take you as deep as you want to go.
Didn't finish it, too academic for my liking, Learn how deception detection happens or doesnt, Spoiler: its not because liars look like theyre lying,

Apart from a deep dive intoyears of research into deception detection, this book is also humble and candid in sharing the trials and travails of experimental design, the actual work of science, and the road to constructing a testable and replicable theory.


This is what great science writing looks like, Meh. Way too academic/in the weeds with most of this, And disappointing in what I learned or more appropriately, didnt learn, Who knew that a subsequent confession by a deceiver improves lie detection! Thanks Professor Levine for your amazing insight in proposition! Levine has some very interesting ideas, and I think he's definitely on to something, but as a member of the unwashed masses, I wish he had left some of the academic infighting out of it.
I also think he clung to the old "tell 'em what you're gonna tell them, tell them, and then tell 'em what you told them" formula a little too rigorously, which made for some longwinded prose.
Nevertheless, I appreciate his insights and am glad I read his book, An interesting concept and seems both logical and well backed by research but I would have enjoyed more about the human psychology of why people lie and less detail about the tremendous multitude of research projects that have been done over the years.
This one definitely falls more in the category of scientific reading, Five for clarity, quality of information, and for Levine's methodical march through the social science, That methodical march will turn readers off if they were expecting pop psychology, Dont do this as an audiobook, Incredibly insightful and useful book on deception marked as abecause it was often extremely repetitive and couldve been shrunk down by several chapters Truly amazing!
"I dont want to be part of the problem, and I want to be a positive scientific role model.
"
I want it too!,