Duped: Truth Default theory By Timothy R. Levine Book Review

Timothy R. Levine is one of the distinguished professors and chairs of the department of communication studies at the University of Alabama. Birmingham and has been studying deception for more than thirty years. And his book Duped: truth default theory is truly an amazing effort. So talking about the book,

In this growing and developing time we general people have been victims of conspiracy theories and economic scams that should be dismissed, so why are we the victims? Well, this happens because of a near-universal human tendency, which Levine Mentions as the tendency to operate mindset that can be categorized as truth-default, and because of us accepting everything … almost everything we hear we uncritically accept them as honest messages. With this, we are perpetually blinded by deception. We also did discuss few things somewhat similar to this in the review of Factfulness.



So here’s a question, Is there anything that can be done to militate against our vulnerability to deception without further eroding the trust in people and social institutions that we so desperately need in civil society?

Well this book recounts a decade long program of ‘empirical research’ that concludes in a new theory, well that is of course truth default theory. Talking about this truth default theory, well this the theory holds that the content of future communication is taken as true, whatever it might be, and most of the time this is good, as this theory has us humans to function socially as well, we will be addressing social needs to some degree through this. 

Most of the deception is acted out by a few prolific liars who make truth bias not bias at all. Likewise, passive belief makes us right most of the time, but the thing is it makes us vulnerable to occasional deceit.


Lie detection and truth bias research by Levine has produced many findings over the years, and in this book he has uncovered what makes some people more trustworthy or let’s say believable than others and yes it’s a good book for lie detection accuracy. Well this book is not all words, everything which is written here has justified reasons and facts as Levine details them out, where these ideas came from, their tests, how their findings and conclusions helped produce a coherent new understanding of human deception and lie detection.

This book is quite a catch as it’s not just words, there’s the whole matter there, it took me some time to read and understand stuff and yeah it also helped to gain some sense of alertness, as I really don’t want to be the gullible one out there and be swayed by those false information, economic scams, etc. 

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