Thomas Costello
Special guest
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, and 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.
Thomas Costello has been a guest on 1 episode.
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70: Special Series Episode 2: Metacognition and Judgment
October 5th, 2026 | 39 mins 10 secs
barry schwartz, cristine legare, dan mcadams, dilip jeste, emotions, eranda jayawickreme, exemplars, gord pennycook, happiness, interventions, judgment, judith glück, justin brienza, kristján kristjánsson, laurie paul, meaning, measuring wisdom, metacognition, monika ardelt, narratives, philosophy, psychology, purpose, reasoning, social science, steve fleming, thomas costello, training ethan kross, well being, wisdom
Welcome to a five-episode special series built around the first Annual Review of Psychology chapter on wisdom since 2011.
Episode 2: Metacognition and Judgment (with Gord Pennycook, Steve Fleming, and Thomas Costello)
Is thinking harder always the key to making better decisions, or can it sometimes make things worse? Gord Pennycook, Steve Fleming, and Thomas Costello join Igor and Charles to explore what happens when we start thinking about our own thinking. Gord reveals why intelligence and rationality aren't the same thing, and why simply thinking more isn't necessarily the answer, Steve takes us inside the machinery that helps us monitor and regulate our decisions, and Thomas explores what intellectual humility is, how we might recognize it, and why being confident about our own competence can be so misleading. Along the way, Igor and Charles uncover a three-part cycle at the heart of wise judgment: seeking input, resolving conflicts, and monitoring what happens next. So what does it take to become better at knowing what we know, and what we don't?