Tom Costello

Thomas Costello is an Assistant Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds appointments as Affiliated Faculty at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and is a Research Affiliate at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His research integrates psychology, political science, and human-computer interaction to examine where our viewpoints come from, how they differ from person to person, why they change. He also studies the sweeping impacts of artificial intelligence on these belief- and society-related processes. Dr. Costello’s work has been supported by federal agencies, philanthropic foundations, and corporate sponsors, and has been published in top peer-reviewed outlets, including Science, Nature, Nature Medicine, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. He has been featured in outlets such as The New York Times, BBC World News, and NPR. Thomas developed DebunkBot.com, a public tool for combating conspiracy theories with AI. He has been awarded the Rising Star award from the Association for Psychological Science, the Klarman Fellowship from Cornell University, the Heritage Dissertation Research Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the JS Tanaka Dissertation Award from the Association for Research in Personality. In third grade, he hit a stand-up triple – and it's all been downhill from there.