ABSTRACT
The four chapters we reviewed for this section all start with fascinating questions-we deal with them in reverse order: What can public health and political communicators learn from understanding responses to reminders of death? Why the puzzling lack of variability in success rates among studies examining deception detection? Has our attention to traditional attribution dimensions blinded us to the complex ways in which people assume motives in social interaction? How have new media changed the way we connect with (and control) each other? In each chapter the reader is guided through a twisting plot to a plausible conclusion. Each one also speaks to a broader narrative about researchers operating on inter-disciplinary margins. In two cases-Dilliplane’s synthesis of terror management theory with work on fear appeals, and Bazarova and Hancock’s critical review of attribution theory-the authors incorporate work from social psychology and thus bring new theory into communication. In Rice and Hagen’s work on new media and Levine’s essay on deception, the authors mine territory that has long lain in the “third spaces” between (and across) disciplines. Many would argue that scholars like these are the best equipped to take science forward: In a world of excessive specialization, those who operate on inter-disciplinary boundaries may well take theory and research to the next level.
