D M Markowitz
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 41993 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | D M Markowitz |
| NOMBRES | D M |
| APELLIDO | Markowitz |
| FIRMA | MARKOWITZ D M |
| AFILIACIONES | Michigan State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7159-7014 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 46 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 46 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2016 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Artificial Intelligence and the Psychology of Human Connection
As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly embedded in social life, understanding its interpersonal and psychological implications is urgent yet undertheorized. This article introduces the machine-integrated relational adaptation (MIRA) model, a transdisciplinary, middle-range theoretical framework that provides a foundational account of when, how, and why AI functions as a relational entity in human ecosystems. MIRA distinguishes two c…
Fueling the fire
The 2024 US presidential election unfolded in an environment of heightened polarization, widespread distrust, and unprecedented public anger. Drawing on the Anger Activism Model (AAM), we examined this period of history to assess how anger interacts with external political efficacy to shape opposition toward democratic behaviors and support for partisan and political violence. Using data from a rolling cross‐sectional national survey of US adults…
An Explication and Classroom Field Study of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab’s Expert (VHIL-E) LLM
89) used VHIL-E to query and understand the course materials and logged hallucinations, which were "egregiously wrong answers." Students then chose the single worst wrong answer over 8 weeks. They then compared the Base/RAG Hybrid-which prioritized the RAG but allowed ChatGPT to consult its general intelligence-to the RAG Constrained, which limited substantive information to the embedded index. Allowing VHIL-E access to GPT produced more than twi…
Re-examining relational pursuit and mate selection in online dating
Having too many online dating options has been theorized to hamper relational pursuit by making people choosier and ponder their options. However, daters do not make a choice just by comparing the value of their mates – they also consider how they will be evaluated by these mates and adapt behaviors accordingly. Therefore, being exposed to a larger option set may instead enhance relational pursuit outcomes by facilitating a compatible match and a…
The (in)efficacy of AI personas in deception detection experiments
Artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been used to aid in deception detection and to simulate human data in social scientific research. Thus, it is important to consider how well these tools can inform both enterprises. We report 12 studies, accessed through the Viewpoints.ai research platform, where AI (gemini-1.5-flash) made veracity judgments of humans. We systematically varied the nature and duration of the communication, modality, truth-…
Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Use and Its Psychological Correlates via Months of Web-Browsing Data
Despite widespread discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) and its impact on society, little work has objectively measured how often people use this technology in the wild. The present article collected up to 90 days of web-browsing data from students (Study 1: N = 499) and those in the general public (Study 2: N = 455), quantifying how often people used AI and evaluating the psychological correlates of such use. Upon coding 4.1 million we…
A Looking Glass into a Research Wonderland
How has the field of virtual reality (VR) evolved and what type of research has made an impact? We used natural language processing techniques and generative artificial intelligence to develop the most complete review of experimental social science VR research to date (1992–2024). From a collection of 21,195 abstracts written by 52,543 unique authors, 13 reliable themes emerged over time, with immersive experiences receiving the most recent atten…
Empowered by the Experience
Research on female video game characters often investigates negative outcomes of playing as stereotyped characters. Yet, video games increasingly offer people opportunities to play as capable, prominent female characters that may be meaningful and promote positive outcomes (e.g., feelings of empowerment). This manuscript shares the results of a mixed methods survey of individuals ( N = 751) recruited via online forums who recalled their experienc…
A Registered Conceptual Replication and Extension of Carter and Weber (2010)
This paper provides a conceptual replication and extension of Carter and Weber investigating the effects of generalized trust on deception detection. Three alternative predictions were tested: trust lowers accuracy, trust increases accuracy, or trust facilitates accuracy for truths but inhibits lie detection. Compared to Carter and Weber, our experiment involved different stimulus materials, a much larger sample, and the inclusion of a lie preval…
Context in Natural Language Processing Research
This paper examines the critical, yet undertheorized role of context in verbal communication when computers are used to analyze language data. Drawing on multiple disciplines and prior work from communication and social psychology, an interactionist perspective is reviewed and applied to computational settings to demonstrate how individual, interpersonal, social, and situational factors afford or constrain verbal behavior. Using examples of langu…
Five canonical findings from 30 years of psychological experimentation in virtual reality
Journalists, Emotions, and the Introduction of Generative AI Chatbots
As part of a broader look at the impact of generative AI, this study investigated the emotional responses of journalists to the release of ChatGPT at the time of its launch. By analyzing nearly 1 million Tweets from journalists at major US news outlets, we tracked changes in emotion, tone, and sentiment before and after the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022. Using various computational and natural language processing techniques to measure …
The truth-default is ubiquitous, but some people experience it more than others
Truth-default theory posits that most people are normatively honest and are believed by others. Do people think that others consider them honest? This paper explores how social perceptions of deception align with the truth-default. Using data from the All of Us dataset (N = 116,914 total respondents), we observed that most people feel trusted. While the predicted long-tail distribution was universal across subsamples, people who self-identified a…
Words for Sale
Prior work suggests when instrumental goals are salient, linguistic complexity associates with positive behavioral outcomes compared to linguistic simplicity. The current work tested this idea using descriptions from over 1,000 online realty advertisements to associate with housing prices. The evidence suggested linguistic complexity (e.g., fewer common words, more analytic writing, and less readable writing) indeed associated with higher housing…
Generative AI Are More Truth-Biased Than Humans
Humans often display a truth-bias—the perception that others are honest independent of message veracity—but does this phenomenon extend to generative artificial intelligence (AI)? We had humans and large language models make nearly 1,000 veracity judgments across different prompts. Human detection accuracies were near chance (50%–53%) with notable truth-biases (59%–64%); AI had a substantially greater truth-bias than humans (67%–99%). GPT-4 was a…
Verbal behavior and the future of social science
Natural language processing (NLP)-previously the domain of a select few language and computer scientists-is undergoing an unprecedented surge in popularity across disciplines. The ubiquity of language data, alongside extremely rapid methodological innovations, has magnetized the field, attracting researchers with the promise of measuring, forecasting, and understanding the most central questions in business, psychology, biology, sociology, the hu…
Presence and Pronouns
As social virtual reality (VR) continues to grow as a medium for digital communication, sustaining presence among communicators remains one of the main constructs that researchers and practitioners use to assess the quality of user experience. In the present paper, we explore language patterns as a behavioral link to presence. We accomplished this through an exploratory text analysis of over 4,800 min of conversation in social VR, consisting of o…
The role of theory in researching and understanding human communication
Communication is a theory-driven discipline, but does it always need to be? This article raises questions related to the role of theory in communication science, with the goal of providing a thoughtful discussion about what theory is, why theory is (or is not) important, the role of exploration in theory development, what constitutes a theoretical contribution, and the current state of theory in the field. We describe communication researchers' i…
Self-presentation in medicine
Toward a Deeper Understanding of Prolific Lying
Prior work suggests those who lie prolifically tend to be younger and self-identify as male compared to those who engage in everyday lying, but little research has developed an understanding of prolific lying beyond demographics. Study 1 ( N = 775) replicated the prior demographic effects and assessed prolific lying through situation-level (e.g., opportunistic cheating) and individual-level characteristics (e.g., dispositional traits, general com…
Authentic First Impressions Relate to Interpersonal, Social, and Entrepreneurial Success
This article examines how verbal authenticity influences person perception. Our work combines human judgments and natural language processing to suggest verbal authenticity is a positive predictor of interpersonal interest (Study 1: 294 dyadic conversations), engagement with speeches (Study 2: 2,655 TED talks), entrepreneurial success (Study 3: 478 Shark Tank pitches), and social media engagements (Studies 4a–c; N = 387,039 Tweets). We find that …
Deceptive (De)humanization
This paper introduces the concept of deceptive (de)humanization, the internal belief that an outgroup is less-than-human while dishonestly acknowledging aspects of their humanity for impression management purposes. In a large online experiment ( N = 1,169), participants wrote about their false or truthful opinions on an outgroup they perceived as more evolved or less evolved. Following several automated text analyses, the data indicated psycholog…
All the Makings of an Eventual NFL Starter
Student-athletes are often treated differently and inequitably based on their race/ethnicity. For example, Black student-athletes often face unjust stereotyping and discrimination because they are seen for their athletic achievements over their academic achievements compared to White student-athletes. Using in-game broadcast data, Black athletes are also discussed differently than White athletes, with disparities in how broadcasters focus on play…
Linguistic Markers of Inherently False AI Communication and Intentionally False Human Communication
To the human eye, AI-generated outputs of large language models have increasingly become indistinguishable from human-generated outputs. Therefore, to determine the linguistic properties that separate AI-generated text from human-generated text, we used a state-of-the-art chatbot, ChatGPT, and compared how it wrote hotel reviews to human-generated counterparts across content (emotion), style (analytic writing, adjectives), and structural features…
Taking Note of Our Biases
The comments teachers write when sending students to the office have the potential to increase our understanding of how bias may contribute to longstanding racial disparities in school discipline. However, large-scale analysis of open text has traditionally had a prohibitive cost. Through natural language processing techniques, we examined over 3.5 million office discipline records from national samples of more than 4,000 schools for whether teac…
Linguistic Obfuscation in Fraudulent Science
The rise of scientific fraud has drawn significant attention to research misconduct across disciplines. Documented cases of fraud provide an opportunity to examine whether scientists write differently when reporting on fraudulent research. In an analysis of over two million words, we evaluated 253 publications retracted for fraudulent data and compared the linguistic style of each paper to a corpus of 253 unretracted publications and 62 publicati…
The role of theory in researching and understanding human communication
Communication is a theory-driven discipline, but does it always need to be? This article raises questions related to the role of theory in communication science, with the goal of providing a thoughtful discussion about what theory is, why theory is (or is not) important, the role of exploration in theory development, what constitutes a theoretical contribution, and the current state of theory in the field. We describe communication researchers' i…
What Words Are Worth
Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding? In an analysis of over 7.4 million words covering 19,569 proposals, this article presents evidence that the writing style of NSF grant abstracts corresponds to the amount of money received for the award. The data describe a clear relationship between word patterns and funding magnitude: Grant abstracts that are longer than the average abstract, contain fewer…
Academy Awards Speeches Reflect Social Status, Cinematic Roles, and Winning Expectations
An analysis of Academy Awards acceptance speeches revealed that social status is indicated through pronouns. Speeches from high status movie directors contained fewer self-references than relatively low status actors. Directors also communicated analytically compared with actors, who told stories and communicated narratively. A post hoc analysis revealed that unexpected award winners communicated more positively than those who were expected to wi…
Defining empathy
While a consumer revolution in virtual reality (VR) has piqued the interest of many fields, industries, and professions, it is unclear when, how, and to what degree the technology can elicit empathy. To better understand how the relationship between VR and empathy is communicated and defined, we performed qualitative and quantitative thematic analyses on popular ( N = 640) and academic articles ( N = 53) that included both terms. Findings reveale…
Linguistic Markers of Inherently False AI Communication and Intentionally False Human Communication
To the human eye, AI-generated outputs of large language models have increasingly become indistinguishable from human-generated outputs. Therefore, to determine the linguistic properties that separate AI-generated text from human-generated text, we used a state-of-the-art chatbot, ChatGPT, and compared how it wrote hotel reviews to human-generated counterparts across content (emotion), style (analytic writing, adjectives), and structural features…
Taking Note of Our Biases
The comments teachers write when sending students to the office have the potential to increase our understanding of how bias may contribute to longstanding racial disparities in school discipline. However, large-scale analysis of open text has traditionally had a prohibitive cost. Through natural language processing techniques, we examined over 3.5 million office discipline records from national samples of more than 4,000 schools for whether teac…
Instrumental goal activation increases online petition support across languages
1,047,655 petitions and over 200 million words), assessing how the linguistic fluency of a petition associates with support. Consistent with prior work, petitions with lower rates of lexical fluency (fewer common words) associated with more signatures and an increased probability of petitions making a concrete change than those with higher rates of lexical fluency (more common words). Exploratory results suggest other forms of linguistic complexi…
Verbal behavior and the future of social science
Natural language processing (NLP)-previously the domain of a select few language and computer scientists-is undergoing an unprecedented surge in popularity across disciplines. The ubiquity of language data, alongside extremely rapid methodological innovations, has magnetized the field, attracting researchers with the promise of measuring, forecasting, and understanding the most central questions in business, psychology, biology, sociology, the hu…
Presence and Pronouns
As social virtual reality (VR) continues to grow as a medium for digital communication, sustaining presence among communicators remains one of the main constructs that researchers and practitioners use to assess the quality of user experience. In the present paper, we explore language patterns as a behavioral link to presence. We accomplished this through an exploratory text analysis of over 4,800 min of conversation in social VR, consisting of o…
Science Training for Political Reporters
This project analyzed the impact of a 2.5-day science training boot camp for political reporters on their use of scientific sources in published reporting. Results showed that immediately following the boot camp, most survey respondents indicated they would try to incorporate more scientific material into future stories. We used both automated text analysis and human-coded analysis to examine if actual changes in reporting behavior occurred. Auto…
Communicating Imperatives Requires Psychological Closeness But Creates Psychological Distance
This article evaluates the psychological correlates of imperative speech through pronouns. We demonstrate that people communicate with more collective immediacy (“we” words) when using imperatives than nonimperatives in an experiment (Study 1, N = 828) and field studies of American politicians (Study 2a: N = 123,678 speeches), and Joseph Stalin (Study 2b: N = 593 speeches). However, respondents experience a psychological distancing effect after a…
Linguistic Obfuscation in Fraudulent Science
The rise of scientific fraud has drawn significant attention to research misconduct across disciplines. Documented cases of fraud provide an opportunity to examine whether scientists write differently when reporting on fraudulent research. In an analysis of over two million words, we evaluated 253 publications retracted for fraudulent data and compared the linguistic style of each paper to a corpus of 253 unretracted publications and 62 publicati…
Immersive Virtual Reality Field Trips Facilitate Learning About Climate Change
Across four studies, two controlled lab experiments and two field studies, we tested the efficacy of immersive Virtual Reality (VR) as an education medium for teaching the consequences of climate change, particularly ocean acidification. Over 270 participants from four different learning settings experienced an immersive underwater world designed to show the process and effects of rising sea water acidity. In our studies, people learned about mar…
Deception in Mobile Dating Conversations
A salient issue for online romantic relationships is the possibility of deception, but it is unclear how lies are communicated before daters meet. We collected mobile dating deceptions from the discovery phase, a conversation period after daters match on profiles but before a face-to-face interaction. Study 1 found that nearly two-thirds of lies were driven by impression management, particularly self-presentation and availability management goals…
Academy Awards Speeches Reflect Social Status, Cinematic Roles, and Winning Expectations
An analysis of Academy Awards acceptance speeches revealed that social status is indicated through pronouns. Speeches from high status movie directors contained fewer self-references than relatively low status actors. Directors also communicated analytically compared with actors, who told stories and communicated narratively. A post hoc analysis revealed that unexpected award winners communicated more positively than those who were expected to wi…
What Words Are Worth
Can word patterns from grant abstracts predict National Science Foundation (NSF) funding? In an analysis of over 7.4 million words covering 19,569 proposals, this article presents evidence that the writing style of NSF grant abstracts corresponds to the amount of money received for the award. The data describe a clear relationship between word patterns and funding magnitude: Grant abstracts that are longer than the average abstract, contain fewer…
The Deception Spiral
In four studies, we evaluated how corporate misconduct relates to language patterns, perceptions of immorality, and unethical behavior. First, we analyzed nearly 190 codes of conduct from S&P 500 manufacturing companies and observed that corporations with ethics infractions had more linguistically obfuscated codes than corporations without ethics infractions. Next, we tested perceptions of a company based on values statements modified by obfuscat…
Communicating Imperatives Requires Psychological Closeness But Creates Psychological Distance
This article evaluates the psychological correlates of imperative speech through pronouns. We demonstrate that people communicate with more collective immediacy (“we” words) when using imperatives than nonimperatives in an experiment (Study 1, N = 828) and field studies of American politicians (Study 2a: N = 123,678 speeches), and Joseph Stalin (Study 2b: N = 593 speeches). However, respondents experience a psychological distancing effect after a…
The Meaning Extraction Method
Qualitative content analyses often rely on a top-down approach to understand themes in a collection of texts. A codebook prescribes how humans should judge if a text fits a theme based on rules and judgment criteria. Qualitative approaches are challenging because they require many resources (e.g., coders, training, rounds of coding), can be affected by researcher or coder bias, may miss meaningful patterns that deviate from the codebook, and ofte…
It’s the Situation and Your Disposition
Research has documented substantial individual differences in the proclivity for honesty or dishonesty and that personality traits meaningfully account for variations in honesty–dishonesty. Research also shows important situational variation related to deception, as situations can motivate or discourage dishonest behaviors. The current experiment examines personality and situational influences on honesty–dishonesty in tandem, arguing that their e…
The Location of Maximum Emotion in Deceptive and Truthful Texts
Meta-analytic evidence suggests that verbal patterns of emotion betray deceit, but it is presently unclear whether the location of maximum emotion in lies and truths matters to reveal deception. We contribute to the deception literature by offering analyses at the sentence level to locate where emotion is most pronounced in deceptive versus truthful texts. Using two public data sets—news articles (Study 1) and hotel reviews (Study 2)—we found tha…
Revisiting the Relationship Between Deception and Design
Evidence published nearly 20 years ago suggested people tell more lies per social interaction via synchronous, distributed, and recordless media (the phone) versus relatively richer (face-to-face communication) and leaner media (email, instant messaging). With nontrivial changes to the size and variety of our media landscape, it is worth re-examining the relationship between deception and technology. Over 7 days, 250 participants reported their s…
Defining empathy
While a consumer revolution in virtual reality (VR) has piqued the interest of many fields, industries, and professions, it is unclear when, how, and to what degree the technology can elicit empathy. To better understand how the relationship between VR and empathy is communicated and defined, we performed qualitative and quantitative thematic analyses on popular ( N = 640) and academic articles ( N = 53) that included both terms. Findings reveale…
Words to Submit by
Language patterns of complexity and confidence often indicate positive persuasion outcomes across settings. For example, such word types correlate with funding support from grant agencies and online crowds. This paper tested the preregistered hypothesis that language patterns of complexity and confidence also relate to a conference submission’s acceptance. Replicating and extending prior work, submissions from the International Communication Asso…
Trusting on the shoulders of open giants? Open science increases trust in science for the public and academics
Researchers often focus on the benefits of adopting open science, yet questions remain whether the general public, as well as academics, value and trust studies consistent with open science compared to studies without open science. In three preregistered experiments (total N = 2,691), we find that the general public perceived open science research and researchers as more credible and trustworthy than non-open science counterparts (Studies 1 and 2…
Examining the Examiners
This study describes differences in medicolegal death investigators’ written descriptions for people who died by homicide, suicide, or accident. We evaluated 17 years of death descriptions from a midsized metropolitan midwestern county in the United States to assess how death investigators psychologically respond to different manners of death (N = 10,408 cases). Automated text analyses suggest investigators describe accidental deaths with more im…
Psychological trauma and emotional upheaval as revealed in academic writing
The current paper used a preregistered set of language dimensions to indicate how scientists psychologically managed the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. Study 1 evaluated over 1.8 million preprints from arXiv.org and assessed how papers written during the COVID-19 pandemic reflected patterns of psychological trauma and emotional upheaval compared to those written before the pandemic. The data suggest papers written during the pandemic containe…
Credibility Perceptions and Detection Accuracy of Fake News Headlines on Social Media
This article focuses on message credibility and detection accuracy of fake and real news as represented on social media. We developed a deception detection paradigm for news headlines and conducted two online experiments to examine the extent to which people (1) perceive news headlines as credible, and (2) accurately distinguish fake and real news across three general topics (i.e., politics, science, and health). Both studies revealed that people…
How Experts React
How do COVID-19 experts psychologically manage the pandemic and its effects? Using a full year of press briefings (January 2020–January 2021) from the World Health Organization ( N = 126), this paper evaluated the relationship between communication patterns and COVID-19 cases and deaths. The data suggest as COVID-19 cases and deaths increased, health experts tended to think about the virus in a more formal and analytic manner. Experts also commun…
Science Training for Political Reporters
This project analyzed the impact of a 2.5-day science training boot camp for political reporters on their use of scientific sources in published reporting. Results showed that immediately following the boot camp, most survey respondents indicated they would try to incorporate more scientific material into future stories. We used both automated text analysis and human-coded analysis to examine if actual changes in reporting behavior occurred. Auto…
The Truth Project
The United States Constitution grants Americans the “right to a speedy and public trial,” with an assumption that the trial is impartial and fair. Recent data suggest a nontrivial number of cases fail to meet this standard. During interrogations, suspects can be presented with false evidence, long interrogations can undermine a suspect’s cognitive ability, and minimization tactics often mislead suspects into believing justice is on their side. Th…
Self-presentation in medicine
Toward a Deeper Understanding of Prolific Lying
Prior work suggests those who lie prolifically tend to be younger and self-identify as male compared to those who engage in everyday lying, but little research has developed an understanding of prolific lying beyond demographics. Study 1 ( N = 775) replicated the prior demographic effects and assessed prolific lying through situation-level (e.g., opportunistic cheating) and individual-level characteristics (e.g., dispositional traits, general com…
Authentic First Impressions Relate to Interpersonal, Social, and Entrepreneurial Success
This article examines how verbal authenticity influences person perception. Our work combines human judgments and natural language processing to suggest verbal authenticity is a positive predictor of interpersonal interest (Study 1: 294 dyadic conversations), engagement with speeches (Study 2: 2,655 TED talks), entrepreneurial success (Study 3: 478 Shark Tank pitches), and social media engagements (Studies 4a–c; N = 387,039 Tweets). We find that …
Deceptive (De)humanization
This paper introduces the concept of deceptive (de)humanization, the internal belief that an outgroup is less-than-human while dishonestly acknowledging aspects of their humanity for impression management purposes. In a large online experiment ( N = 1,169), participants wrote about their false or truthful opinions on an outgroup they perceived as more evolved or less evolved. Following several automated text analyses, the data indicated psycholog…
All the Makings of an Eventual NFL Starter
Student-athletes are often treated differently and inequitably based on their race/ethnicity. For example, Black student-athletes often face unjust stereotyping and discrimination because they are seen for their athletic achievements over their academic achievements compared to White student-athletes. Using in-game broadcast data, Black athletes are also discussed differently than White athletes, with disparities in how broadcasters focus on play…
Psychology (39 obras) · Social Psychology (27 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (16 obras) · Deception (14 obras) · Deception detection and forensic psychology (14 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Linguistics (10 obras) · Law (9 obras)