Dr. Daniel P. Relihan
Deputy Director of Research & Research Assistant Professor, Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University
2025
Dr. Daniel P. Relihan is Deputy Director of Research at the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) and Research Assistant Professor at American University. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Psychology from the University of California, Irvine.
Dr. Relihan brings 15 years of expertise studying how people form beliefs, process threatening information, and navigate manipulative online environments. His research focuses on “psychological inoculation”—pre-emptively exposing people to weakened forms of misleading content to build cognitive immunity, much like medical vaccines build biological immunity. This public health approach to extremism prevention has proven particularly effective, showing 8-13% increases in manipulation recognition and up to 24% increased intentions to challenge harmful online content.
At PERIL, Dr. Relihan has operationalized this research into a groundbreaking three-stage pipeline—DETECT, DEVELOP, and DISTRIBUTE—that identifies emerging harmful online narratives through AI-assisted monitoring, creates evidence-based inoculation interventions tested with thousands of participants, and builds population-level psychological resilience through strategic partnerships. These interventions have achieved 7-21% reductions in susceptibility to extremist narratives and reached nearly 2 million people, while reducing response time from months to weeks.
Dr. Relihan’s broader research examines how social identity, motivated reasoning, and moral perspectives shape responses to threatening information and societal challenges. Published in Annual Review of Psychology, Political Psychology, Scientific Reports, and PNAS Nexus, his work reveals how motivated reasoning overrides facts when identity is threatened, how social proof drives belief adoption even against evidence, and how uncertainty makes people vulnerable to manipulation—insights directly applicable to understanding AI’s influence on human judgment. Currently, he is innovating at the intersection of AI and social psychology, developing systems that detect psychological vulnerabilities while building user psychological resilience rather than exploiting weaknesses.
Dr. Relihan collaborates with academic, non-profit, and technology partners to develop and evaluate evidence-based prevention strategies, while overseeing research that measures the effectiveness of PERIL’s resource guides and workshops for educators, parents, and community leaders. His “protective psychology” approach emphasizes strengthening psychological defenses against manipulation from any source—whether AI-generated content, social media algorithms, or extremist groups. His research has been supported by Time-sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences, a National Science Foundation-funded project. Dr. Relihan ensures individuals and communities have evidence-based tools to navigate increasingly sophisticated AI-enhanced information environments.
It is a tragic reality that hateful ideology has found fertile ground online and offline, with consequences affecting not only Americans but people around the world. We cannot stand idle in the face of bias, bigotry, and extremism. Together, at the Eradicate Hate Summit and beyond, the collective will of individuals and organizations is needed to galvanize all people of good will to protect and defend our communities.
