Thomas Costello

Thomas H. Costello is an Assistant Professor in Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Viewpoints Lab. He also holds affiliated faculty appointments at CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute and serves as a Research Affiliate at MIT's Sloan School of Management. He earned his PhD from Emory University under Scott Lilienfeld and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT Sloan with David Rand and Gordon Pennycook. His research integrates psychology, political science, and human-computer interaction to study belief formation, attitude change, and the societal impacts of artificial intelligence on persuasion and misinformation. His landmark 2024 Science paper demonstrated that personalized AI dialogues (using GPT-4 Turbo) reduced conspiracy beliefs by approximately 20% in a large sample, with effects persisting for two months, earning the 2026 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize. A subsequent 2025 Nature paper examined AI's persuasive power in political contexts, and his work on frontier LLMs' ability to persuade humans on extreme and hazardous topics directly addresses AI safety concerns around manipulative AI systems. He is a Research Affiliate at FAR.AI and was named an APS Rising Star in 2025.

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