- Doctor of Philosophy; Psychology and Computer Science Departments; University of Cambridge
- Master of Philosophy in Psychology; University of Cambridge
- Master of Science in Social Psychology; SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities
Michal Kosinski is a Visiting Professor of Management and Strategy at HKU Business School. A computational social scientist, he uses AI to study people — and psychology to study AI. Before joining HKU, he was Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he taught from 2015 to 2026. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Cambridge, where he served as Deputy Director of the Psychometrics Centre, and was a Research Associate at Microsoft Research Cambridge.
Professor Kosinski’s current research focuses on the psychology of AI. He was among the first to document human-like psychological processes emerging in large language models, including the ability to solve the false-belief tasks used to test Theory of Mind in humans (PNAS, 2024) — work that helped open a new field of research. His earlier studies showed that ordinary digital footprints — Likes, language, and photos — can be used to predict intimate psychological traits, in some cases more accurately than one’s friends and family can. He warned about the misuse of such profiling as early as 2013 and was behind the first press article on Cambridge Analytica (The Guardian, December 2015), years before the scandal broke; his findings have informed privacy debates and regulatory action in the U.S. and Europe.
He has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers in journals including PNAS, Nature Computational Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and American Psychologist, and is a co-author of the textbook Modern Psychometrics and of the “Using Big Data” chapter in the Handbook of Social Psychology. His work has been cited over 30,000 times (h-index: 65), and Clarivate has ranked him among the top 1% most-cited researchers worldwide every year since 2021. In 2025, he received the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Diener Award, a leading mid-career honor in psychology, at the earliest career stage of any recipient to date.
Beyond academia, Professor Kosinski advises governments and corporations on AI. He has testified before the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and briefed bodies including the U.S. Department of Justice, the European Parliament, the European Central Bank, and the U.K. AI Security Institute, and he serves on the AI Board of TELUS. His research has been the subject of a cover story in The Economist and inspired the theatre production “Privacy” (Donmar Warehouse, London; Public Theater, New York) and a video game; it has been featured in press, podcasts, and documentaries worldwide.
- Business Lab (Master of Global Management, PMGM7024)
- Capstone Project (Part-time MBA)
- Artificial Intelligence
- Psychology of AI
- Computational Social Science
- Psychometrics
- Privacy and Algorithmic Governance
- Technology and Public Policy
Selected Books and Book Chapters
- Kosinski, M. (2025). Using Big Data. In: Gilbert, D. T., Fiske, S. T., Finkel, E. J., & Mendes, W. B. (Eds.). The Handbook of Social Psychology, 6th Ed. Situational Press. Download.
- Youngest scholar among the chapter’s first authors, who include Dale Miller, Michele Gelfand, Susan Fiske, Zachary Tormala, Jamil Zaki, and Adam Grant.
- Kosinski, M. (2024). Collecting Digital Footprints in the Wild. In Reis, H. T., West, T. & Judd, C. M. (Eds.) Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology. Cambridge University Press. Download.
- Rust, J., Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. (2020). Modern Psychometrics. Routledge. Purchase.
- Kosinski, M. (2019). Computational Psychology. In Baumeister R. F. & Finkel, E. J. (Eds.) Advanced Social Psychology. USA: Oxford University Press. Download.
Most Representative Peer-Reviewed Publications
- Kosinski, M. (2024). Evaluating Large Language Models in Theory of Mind Tasks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Download.
- First submitted in Jan 2021; published on arXiv in Jan 2023
- Among Top 50 (out of 1 million) most impactful arXiv preprints
- 2nd most impactful PNAS paper of similar age (Altmetrics.com)
- Davidson, T. R., Veselovsky, V., Kosinski, M., West, R. (2024) Evaluating Language Model Agency through Negotiations. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Preprint.
- Cao, X. & Kosinski, M. (2024) ChatGPT Can Accurately Predict Public Figures’ Perceived Personalities Without Any Training. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Nexus (PNAS Nexus). Download.
- Kosinski, M., Khambatta, P., Wang Y. (2024). Facial recognition technology can infer political orientation from stable facial features. American Psychologist. Download.
- 1st most impactful American Psychologist paper of similar age (Altmetrics.com)
- Hagendorff, T., Fabi, S., Kosinski, M. (2023). Human-like intuitive behavior and reasoning biases emerged in large language models but disappeared in ChatGPT. Nature Computational Science. Download.
- Kosinski shares the first authorship with a postdoctoral student
- Downloaded over 50,000 times
- 3rd most impactful Nature Comp. Sci. paper of similar age (Altmetrics.com)
- Digutsch, J., Kosinski, M. (2023). Overlap in Meaning Is a Stronger Predictor of Semantic Activation in GPT-3 Than in Humans. Scientific Reports. Download.
- Kosinski shares the first authorship with a student co-author
- Among Top 100 most downloaded psychology papers published by Scientific Reports in 2023
- Kosinski, M. (2021). Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images. Scientific Reports. Download. Author Notes.
- Downloaded over 230,000 times
- 6th most impactful Scientific Reports paper of similar age (Altmetrics.com)
- Wang, Y., & Kosinski, M. (2018). Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP). Download. Author Notes.
- Kosinski shares the first authorship with a student co-author
- 1st most cited JPSP paper of similar age (Dimensions.ai)
- 1st most read Open Science Foundation preprint of 2017 (85,000 downloads)
- Our policy recommendations inspired the cover article in The Economist (9/9/2017)
- Matz, S. C., Kosinski, M., Nave, G., & Stillwell, D. J. (2017). Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Download.
- Kosinski is the second and senior co-author
- 7th most impactful PNAS paper of similar age (Altmetrics.com)
- Downloaded over 200,000 times
- Kosinski, M. (2017). Facial Width-to-Height Ratio Does Not Predict Self-Reported Behavioral Tendencies. Psychological Science. Download.
- Youyou, W., Schwartz, A., Stillwell, D. J., & Kosinski, M. (2017). Birds of a feather do flock together: behavior-based personality assessment method reveals personality similarity among couples and friends. Psychological Science. Download.
- Kosinski is the second and senior author with a student co-author
- Kosinski, M., Wang, Y., Lakkaraju, H., & Leskovec, J. (2016). Mining Big Data to Extract Patterns and Predict Real-Life Outcomes. Psychological Methods. Download.
- Accompanying code and data samples are downloaded about 3,000 times per year.
- 4th most cited Psychological Methods paper of 2016 (Dimensions.ai).
- Youyou, W., Kosinski, M., & Stillwell, D. J. (2015). Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Download.
- Kosinski shares the first authorship with a student co-author.
- 2nd most impactful PNAS paper of similar age (Altmetrics.com).
- Downloaded over 400,000 times from PNAS.org
- Kosinski, M., Matz, S., Gosling, S. D., Popov, V., & Stillwell, D. J. (2015). Facebook as a Social Science Research Tool: Opportunities, Challenges, Ethical Considerations and Practical Guidelines. American Psychologist. Download.
- 3rd most cited paper of 2015 published in American Psychologist.
- Kosinski, M., Stillwell, D. J., & Graepel, T. (2013). Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Download.
- 1st most impactful PNAS paper of similar age (Altmetrics.com).
- Downloaded over 700,000 times from PNAS.org
- 2025 Diener Award in Personality Psychology; Society of Personality and Social Psychology
- 2025 Early Career Award; Association for Research in Personality
- 2025 William Stern’s Honorary Award; University of Wroclaw
- 2024 Distinguished Fellow; Society of Personality and Social Psychology
- 2023 Early Achievement Award; European Association of Personality Psychology
- 2017 – 2019 Trust Faculty Scholar; Stanford Graduate School of Business
- 2016 Rising Star; Association for Psychological Science
- 2016 Significant Contributions Award; American Educational Research Association
- Technology, Mind, and Behavior: Editorial Board Member
- Frontiers in Social Psychology: Specialty Chief Editor for Computational Social Psychology
- Personality Science: Editorial Board Member
- PNAS Nexus: Board of Reviewing Editors Member