Kelly Morrison
Biographic Data
| ID | 91907 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kelly Morrison |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kelly |
| FAMILY NAME | Morrison |
| SIGNATURE | MORRISON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tennessee at Knoxville |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3518-7330 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 119 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Green-Lighting Accountability: Transitional Justice and Compliance With Rulings From the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
When do democratically-elected leaders comply with rulings from international courts? While international courts have been studied independently, little research examines their interaction with state-level transitional justice (TJ) institutions. We evaluate the incentives of post-authoritarian leaders to comply with rulings of international courts related to violence under military dictatorships. We expect leaders to be more likely to comply with…
Impact of democracy on economic, human, and societal development
How does democracy affect economic, human, and societal development? We review the scientific evidence on this question from 2010 to present, finding that democracy improves economic growth, population health, gender equality, and peace. However, we find that empirical findings are either mixed or null for democracy’s effect on economic inequality and poverty, corruption, and education. Our review goes beyond the summary statistics of meta-analys…
Chains in episodes of democratization
How do democratic institutions develop during episodes of liberalization in autocracies? Existing research has theorized about the long process of institutional change that makes up regime transitions, but existing quantitative methods are not equipped to analyze these multi-stage patterns of development across many variables. In this research note, we introduce a new methodology, Analysis of Chains (AOC), that allows for such analysis. Unlike pr…
Mapping the Information Flow Within Deceptive Messages: A Test of the IM Propositions of IMT2
This paper presents results from the first formal empirical test of Information Manipulation Theory 2 (IMT2). Specifically, two hypotheses were posited based upon three of the information manipulation (IM) propositions of IMT2. First, we predicted that a systematic rank ordering should be observable regarding the frequency of various types of information manipulation within deceptive messages; such that Gricean Quality violations are more frequen…
Can We Be Honest? Cognition, Intention, Speech Production, and the Future of Deception Research
The last many years have given us clear and startling insights into human cognition and the process of human speech production. Yet much of current deception research eschews such revelations. Specifically, many deception scholars continue to presume a top-down, sequential-stepwise, selection-based speech production model that begins with a singular intent-to-deceive and ends with selection between binary discourse options-truth versus lie-that t…
Why voters (sometimes) punish repression
How does repression influence democratic leaders’ performance in elections? When weighing rights protections against other issues, I expect voters to punish candidates who advocate repression of in-group members but reward candidates who support repression of threatening out-groups. I evaluate the causal effect of repression on vote share using a conjoint experiment among registered voters in the United States. I find that, among those who identi…
Buying Survival: Why Do Leaders Hire Mercenaries
Mercenaries play an increasingly important role in international and domestic security. Why do leaders hire mercenaries? We argue that leaders employ private military organizations to guard against the risk of coups, but only when these leaders have weak ties to the international community. While mercenaries can diffuse domestic military capacity, an essential coup-proofing function, they also put some leaders at risk of international opprobrium …
Named and Shamed: International Advocacy and Public Support for Repressive Leaders
Do international naming and shaming campaigns reduce public support for repressive leaders? International advocacy can provide domestic audiences with new information about human rights abuses and shift perspectives about repression. When effective, these tactics reduce repression by marring a leader’s reputation with the public. Recent research has begun to analyze this causal pathway but has yet to consider the impact of international advocacy …
Compliance in Time: Lessons from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
This paper integrates the scholarship on compliance with international human rights courts to reflect upon how the literature approaches delays and compliance cycles. Building on this review, we propose a new analytical approach that helps distinguish between reparations prone to immediate or protracted implementation. We introduce two metrics to facilitate the interpretation of delays: the yearly probability of compliance and the expected time t…
Not All Elections Are Created Equal: Election Quality and Civil Conflict
Research on the dangers of democratization has long warned of the potential for elections to spark civil conflict. Yet, this work has remained surprisingly isolated from the burgeoning body of research on electoral integrity. We open the "black box" of elections to theorize how variation in their quality shapes the opportunities and incentives for military conflict. We argue that electoral integrity matters by influencing perceptions about the le…
State of the world 2021: Autocratization Changing Its Nature
This article analyses the state of democracy around the world in 2021. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 was down to 1989 levels. In 2021, autocracies were on the rise, harbouring 70% of the world population, or 5.4 billion people. There was also a record number of countries autocratizing in 2021: 33 countries, home to 36% of the global population. In recent years, the EU seems to be facing its own wave of autoc…
Information Manipulation Theory 2: A Propositional Theory of Deceptive Discourse Production
Information Manipulation Theory 2 (IMT2) is a propositional theory of deceptive discourse production that conceptually frames deception as involving the covert manipulation of information along multiple dimensions and as a contextual problem-solving activity driven by the desire for quick, efficient, and viable communicative solutions. IMT2 is rooted in linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, speech production, and artificial intelligence. Synthesiz…
Expertise in Deception Detection Involves Actively Prompting Diagnostic Information Rather Than Passive Behavioral Observation
In a proof-of-concept study, an expert obtained 100% deception-detection accuracy over 33 interviews. Tapes of the interactions were shown to N = 136 students who obtained 79.1% accuracy (Mdn = 83.3%, mode = 100%). The findings were replicated in a second experiment with 5 different experts who collectively conducted 89 interviews. The new experts were 97.8% accurate in cheating detection and 95.5% accurate at detecting who cheated. A sample of N…
What's love got to do with it? Exploring the impact of maintenance rules, love attitudes, and network support on friends with benefits relationships
Friends with benefits relationships (FWBRs) are defined as relationships between cross‐sex friends in which the friends engage in sexual activity but do not define their relationship as romantic. Relationship scholars have only recently begun to examine these relationships, despite their mention in the popular media (e.g., HBO's ‘Sex in the City,’ MTV's ‘True Life,’ ‘Seinfeld,’ and the New York Times). This study explored the relationship between…
How people really detect lies
A primary focus of research in the area of deceptive communication has been on people's ability to detect deception. The premise of the current paper is that participants in previous deception detection experiments may not have had access to the types of information people most often use to detect real-life lies. Further, deception detection experiments require that people make immediate judgements, although lie detection may occur over much long…
Speaking of information manipulation: A critical rejoinder
This essay critically examines two articles addressing deceptive messages. We take exception with the Jacobs, Dawson, and Brashers claim that IMT is inconsistent with Grice, and compare their arguments to those of Grice. The Jacobs et al. data are reanalyzed and shown to be inconsistent with their premise that deception derives solely from erroneous Quality implicatures. Burgoon, Buller, Guerrero, Afifi, and Feldman's article describing informati…
Bringing order to chaos: Communication and health
An ecological theory of health communication is offered that addresses how communications about health interdependently work together to influence health and/or health‐related behaviors. To explain how a multitude of variables work together in a synergistic manner, the present work borrows heavily from chaos theory. The use of chaos theory concepts represents a significant paradigm shift from previous, more reductionist, health communication pers…
State of the world 2021: Autocratization Changing Its Nature
This article analyses the state of democracy around the world in 2021. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 was down to 1989 levels. In 2021, autocracies were on the rise, harbouring 70% of the world population, or 5.4 billion people. There was also a record number of countries autocratizing in 2021: 33 countries, home to 36% of the global population. In recent years, the EU seems to be facing its own wave of autoc…
Information Manipulation Theory 2: A Propositional Theory of Deceptive Discourse Production
Information Manipulation Theory 2 (IMT2) is a propositional theory of deceptive discourse production that conceptually frames deception as involving the covert manipulation of information along multiple dimensions and as a contextual problem-solving activity driven by the desire for quick, efficient, and viable communicative solutions. IMT2 is rooted in linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, speech production, and artificial intelligence. Synthesiz…
How people really detect lies
A primary focus of research in the area of deceptive communication has been on people's ability to detect deception. The premise of the current paper is that participants in previous deception detection experiments may not have had access to the types of information people most often use to detect real-life lies. Further, deception detection experiments require that people make immediate judgements, although lie detection may occur over much long…
Not All Elections Are Created Equal: Election Quality and Civil Conflict
Research on the dangers of democratization has long warned of the potential for elections to spark civil conflict. Yet, this work has remained surprisingly isolated from the burgeoning body of research on electoral integrity. We open the "black box" of elections to theorize how variation in their quality shapes the opportunities and incentives for military conflict. We argue that electoral integrity matters by influencing perceptions about the le…
Named and Shamed: International Advocacy and Public Support for Repressive Leaders
Do international naming and shaming campaigns reduce public support for repressive leaders? International advocacy can provide domestic audiences with new information about human rights abuses and shift perspectives about repression. When effective, these tactics reduce repression by marring a leader’s reputation with the public. Recent research has begun to analyze this causal pathway but has yet to consider the impact of international advocacy …
Compliance in Time: Lessons from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
This paper integrates the scholarship on compliance with international human rights courts to reflect upon how the literature approaches delays and compliance cycles. Building on this review, we propose a new analytical approach that helps distinguish between reparations prone to immediate or protracted implementation. We introduce two metrics to facilitate the interpretation of delays: the yearly probability of compliance and the expected time t…
Expertise in Deception Detection Involves Actively Prompting Diagnostic Information Rather Than Passive Behavioral Observation
In a proof-of-concept study, an expert obtained 100% deception-detection accuracy over 33 interviews. Tapes of the interactions were shown to N = 136 students who obtained 79.1% accuracy (Mdn = 83.3%, mode = 100%). The findings were replicated in a second experiment with 5 different experts who collectively conducted 89 interviews. The new experts were 97.8% accurate in cheating detection and 95.5% accurate at detecting who cheated. A sample of N…
Bringing order to chaos: Communication and health
An ecological theory of health communication is offered that addresses how communications about health interdependently work together to influence health and/or health‐related behaviors. To explain how a multitude of variables work together in a synergistic manner, the present work borrows heavily from chaos theory. The use of chaos theory concepts represents a significant paradigm shift from previous, more reductionist, health communication pers…
Can We Be Honest? Cognition, Intention, Speech Production, and the Future of Deception Research
The last many years have given us clear and startling insights into human cognition and the process of human speech production. Yet much of current deception research eschews such revelations. Specifically, many deception scholars continue to presume a top-down, sequential-stepwise, selection-based speech production model that begins with a singular intent-to-deceive and ends with selection between binary discourse options-truth versus lie-that t…
Buying Survival: Why Do Leaders Hire Mercenaries
Mercenaries play an increasingly important role in international and domestic security. Why do leaders hire mercenaries? We argue that leaders employ private military organizations to guard against the risk of coups, but only when these leaders have weak ties to the international community. While mercenaries can diffuse domestic military capacity, an essential coup-proofing function, they also put some leaders at risk of international opprobrium …
Speaking of information manipulation: A critical rejoinder
This essay critically examines two articles addressing deceptive messages. We take exception with the Jacobs, Dawson, and Brashers claim that IMT is inconsistent with Grice, and compare their arguments to those of Grice. The Jacobs et al. data are reanalyzed and shown to be inconsistent with their premise that deception derives solely from erroneous Quality implicatures. Burgoon, Buller, Guerrero, Afifi, and Feldman's article describing informati…
Speaking of information manipulation: A critical rejoinder
This essay critically examines two articles addressing deceptive messages. We take exception with the Jacobs, Dawson, and Brashers claim that IMT is inconsistent with Grice, and compare their arguments to those of Grice. The Jacobs et al. data are reanalyzed and shown to be inconsistent with their premise that deception derives solely from erroneous Quality implicatures. Burgoon, Buller, Guerrero, Afifi, and Feldman's article describing informati…
Bringing order to chaos: Communication and health
An ecological theory of health communication is offered that addresses how communications about health interdependently work together to influence health and/or health‐related behaviors. To explain how a multitude of variables work together in a synergistic manner, the present work borrows heavily from chaos theory. The use of chaos theory concepts represents a significant paradigm shift from previous, more reductionist, health communication pers…
How people really detect lies
A primary focus of research in the area of deceptive communication has been on people's ability to detect deception. The premise of the current paper is that participants in previous deception detection experiments may not have had access to the types of information people most often use to detect real-life lies. Further, deception detection experiments require that people make immediate judgements, although lie detection may occur over much long…
What's love got to do with it? Exploring the impact of maintenance rules, love attitudes, and network support on friends with benefits relationships
Friends with benefits relationships (FWBRs) are defined as relationships between cross‐sex friends in which the friends engage in sexual activity but do not define their relationship as romantic. Relationship scholars have only recently begun to examine these relationships, despite their mention in the popular media (e.g., HBO's ‘Sex in the City,’ MTV's ‘True Life,’ ‘Seinfeld,’ and the New York Times). This study explored the relationship between…
Information Manipulation Theory 2: A Propositional Theory of Deceptive Discourse Production
Information Manipulation Theory 2 (IMT2) is a propositional theory of deceptive discourse production that conceptually frames deception as involving the covert manipulation of information along multiple dimensions and as a contextual problem-solving activity driven by the desire for quick, efficient, and viable communicative solutions. IMT2 is rooted in linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, speech production, and artificial intelligence. Synthesiz…
Expertise in Deception Detection Involves Actively Prompting Diagnostic Information Rather Than Passive Behavioral Observation
In a proof-of-concept study, an expert obtained 100% deception-detection accuracy over 33 interviews. Tapes of the interactions were shown to N = 136 students who obtained 79.1% accuracy (Mdn = 83.3%, mode = 100%). The findings were replicated in a second experiment with 5 different experts who collectively conducted 89 interviews. The new experts were 97.8% accurate in cheating detection and 95.5% accurate at detecting who cheated. A sample of N…
Compliance in Time: Lessons from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
This paper integrates the scholarship on compliance with international human rights courts to reflect upon how the literature approaches delays and compliance cycles. Building on this review, we propose a new analytical approach that helps distinguish between reparations prone to immediate or protracted implementation. We introduce two metrics to facilitate the interpretation of delays: the yearly probability of compliance and the expected time t…
Not All Elections Are Created Equal: Election Quality and Civil Conflict
Research on the dangers of democratization has long warned of the potential for elections to spark civil conflict. Yet, this work has remained surprisingly isolated from the burgeoning body of research on electoral integrity. We open the "black box" of elections to theorize how variation in their quality shapes the opportunities and incentives for military conflict. We argue that electoral integrity matters by influencing perceptions about the le…
State of the world 2021: Autocratization Changing Its Nature
This article analyses the state of democracy around the world in 2021. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 was down to 1989 levels. In 2021, autocracies were on the rise, harbouring 70% of the world population, or 5.4 billion people. There was also a record number of countries autocratizing in 2021: 33 countries, home to 36% of the global population. In recent years, the EU seems to be facing its own wave of autoc…
Buying Survival: Why Do Leaders Hire Mercenaries
Mercenaries play an increasingly important role in international and domestic security. Why do leaders hire mercenaries? We argue that leaders employ private military organizations to guard against the risk of coups, but only when these leaders have weak ties to the international community. While mercenaries can diffuse domestic military capacity, an essential coup-proofing function, they also put some leaders at risk of international opprobrium …
Named and Shamed: International Advocacy and Public Support for Repressive Leaders
Do international naming and shaming campaigns reduce public support for repressive leaders? International advocacy can provide domestic audiences with new information about human rights abuses and shift perspectives about repression. When effective, these tactics reduce repression by marring a leader’s reputation with the public. Recent research has begun to analyze this causal pathway but has yet to consider the impact of international advocacy …
Why voters (sometimes) punish repression
How does repression influence democratic leaders’ performance in elections? When weighing rights protections against other issues, I expect voters to punish candidates who advocate repression of in-group members but reward candidates who support repression of threatening out-groups. I evaluate the causal effect of repression on vote share using a conjoint experiment among registered voters in the United States. I find that, among those who identi…
Green-Lighting Accountability: Transitional Justice and Compliance With Rulings From the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
When do democratically-elected leaders comply with rulings from international courts? While international courts have been studied independently, little research examines their interaction with state-level transitional justice (TJ) institutions. We evaluate the incentives of post-authoritarian leaders to comply with rulings of international courts related to violence under military dictatorships. We expect leaders to be more likely to comply with…
Impact of democracy on economic, human, and societal development
How does democracy affect economic, human, and societal development? We review the scientific evidence on this question from 2010 to present, finding that democracy improves economic growth, population health, gender equality, and peace. However, we find that empirical findings are either mixed or null for democracy’s effect on economic inequality and poverty, corruption, and education. Our review goes beyond the summary statistics of meta-analys…
Chains in episodes of democratization
How do democratic institutions develop during episodes of liberalization in autocracies? Existing research has theorized about the long process of institutional change that makes up regime transitions, but existing quantitative methods are not equipped to analyze these multi-stage patterns of development across many variables. In this research note, we introduce a new methodology, Analysis of Chains (AOC), that allows for such analysis. Unlike pr…
Mapping the Information Flow Within Deceptive Messages: A Test of the IM Propositions of IMT2
This paper presents results from the first formal empirical test of Information Manipulation Theory 2 (IMT2). Specifically, two hypotheses were posited based upon three of the information manipulation (IM) propositions of IMT2. First, we predicted that a systematic rank ordering should be observable regarding the frequency of various types of information manipulation within deceptive messages; such that Gricean Quality violations are more frequen…
Can We Be Honest? Cognition, Intention, Speech Production, and the Future of Deception Research
The last many years have given us clear and startling insights into human cognition and the process of human speech production. Yet much of current deception research eschews such revelations. Specifically, many deception scholars continue to presume a top-down, sequential-stepwise, selection-based speech production model that begins with a singular intent-to-deceive and ends with selection between binary discourse options-truth versus lie-that t…
Psychology (7 works) · Deception detection and forensic psychology (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Computer Science (5 works) · Deception (5 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (5 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Law (4 works)