David Markowitz
Associate Professor | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
David Markowitz's research uses language to understand social and psychological processes.
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Biography
Dr. Markowitz is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University, whose research uses language to understand social and psychological processes. For example, his work has examined the lies people tell on dating apps, how language patterns in pet adoption profiles predict a pet getting adopted, and how verbal complexity associates with social engagements and money, plus online petition support. Some of his recent work has also evaluated how bias is revealed in physician medical notes and office discipline referrals.
Dr. Markowitz was selected as a "Rising Star" of the Association for Psychological Science in 2022.
His work has appeared in top outlets such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Communication, Communication Research, and Human Communication Research.
Industry Expertise (2)
Research
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (6)
Media Psychology
Persuasion
Text Analysis
Language
Deception
Computer-mediated communication
Accomplishments (3)
Best Paper Award (professional)
2022 International Association of Language and Social Psychology and the Journal of Language and Social Psychology
Rising Star (professional)
2022 Association for Psychological Science
APEX Award for Academic Publishing Excellence (professional)
2020
Education (3)
Stanford University: Ph.D., Communication 2018
Cornell University: M.S., Communication 2015
Cornell University: B.S., Communication 2010
Affiliations (7)
- Communication Studies : Editorial Board Member
- Academy of Management (AoM)
- Association for Psychological Science (APS)
- International Communication Association (ICA)
- National Communication Association (NCA)
- Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)
- Society for Text and Discourse (ST&D)
Links (5)
News (3)
Here’s What A Language Researcher Says About The January 6th Hearings
Forbes online
2022-10-14
The ninth and final January 6th hearing concluded this week, culminating in the committee’s vote to subpoena former President Trump. Reactions to the hearings have been mixed, but also quite predictable along party lines.
Which Types of People Are the Most Deceptive?
Psychology Today online
2022-07-05
People are often drawn to the topic of deception because they want to become better lie detectors. Decades of deception research suggest trying to achieve this aim is a fool’s errand. However, our default is to assume that others are being honest with us, and we’re therefore poor at detecting lies.
New research reveals gender and race bias in medical care
Fox46 Charlotte (Queen City News) online
2022-03-21
David Markowitz, a psychology of language researcher from the University of Oregon, analyzed 1.8 million medical records from a healthcare system in Boston. The research showed medical caregivers tended to be more impersonal with women and pay less attention to the negative experience of Black patients.
Event Appearances (3)
Deception and language: Insights about communication and the self
Society for Personality and Social Psychology San Diego
Linguistic markers of inherent AI deception and intentional human deception: Evidence from hotel reviews
109th Annual Conference of the National Communication Association National Harbor
Analytic ecosystems increase trust in science and vaccine attitudes
European Association of Social Psychology Meeting Bath
Research Grants (1)
Numeric selfefficacy, objective numeracy, and overconfidence
National Science Foundation $634,975
2020-2023
Journal Articles (5)
Political ideology shapes risk and benefit judgments of COVID-19 vaccines
Risk Analysis2023 In April 2021, the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine was paused to investigate whether it had caused serious blood clots to a small number of women (six out of 6.8 million Americans who had been administered that vaccine).
Taking Note of Our Biases: How Language Patterns Reveal Bias Underlying the Use of Office Discipline Referrals in Exclusionary Discipline
Educational Researcher2023 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.
Analytic thinking as revealed by function words: What does language really measure?
Applied Cognitive Psychology2023 Understanding how people think is a key interest in psychology, and recent advances in automated text analysis have used a verbal analytic thinking index to approximate Kahneman's System 2 (e.g., deliberate, rational thinking). That is, prior work used a style word index to assess university student admissions essays and observed that those who used more articles and prepositions relative to storytelling words (e.g., pronouns) had higher grades at the end of college.
Instrumental goal activation increases online petition support across languages.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology2023 Research on processing fluency and instrumental goal activation suggests people often perceive complex information positively when effort in a task is valued. The current article evaluates this idea in five online petition samples (total N = 1,047,655 petitions and over 200 million words), assessing how the linguistic fluency of a petition associates with support.
Virtual Reality and Emotion: A 5-Year Systematic Review of Empirical Research (2015-2019)
PsyArXiv2021 The central aim of this chapter is to identify how immersive VR can be used as a tool to inform our understanding of emotion and how emotion operates as a mechanism for VR effects. To accomplish this goal, we conducted a 5-year systematic review of the VR and emotion literature (2015-2019), while also reviewing seminal pieces from outside the 5-year timeframe to provide additional perspective on the more recent work.
