Thomas Costello is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at American University and Research Associate at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Psychology from Emory University and completed his B.A. in Philosophy at Binghamton University.

Thomas studies where political and social beliefs come from, how they differ from person to person–and, ultimately, why they change–using the tools of personality, cognitive, clinical, and political science. He is best known for his work on (a) leveraging artificial intelligence to reduce conspiracy theory beliefs and (b) the psychology of authoritarianism. He has published many research papers in peer-reviewed outlets, including Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Thomas has been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Economist, interviewed on television programs like NBC’s Nightly News and the BBC World News, radio shows and podcasts like CBC/Radio-Canada, CNN, NPR, BBC, and The Guardian. Additionally, he developed DebunkBot.com, a public tool for combatting conspiracy theories with AI. His research has secured more than $500,000 in grant funding and earned him several awards, including the Heritage Dissertation Research Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the JS Tanaka Dissertation Award from the Association for Research in Personality, and the Klarman Fellowship from Cornell University.