Thomas Curran, PhD

Thomas Curran is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research examines perfectionism — its measurement, developmental origins, and consequences for mental health — situated within the broader social and economic conditions.

His meta-analyses in Psychological Bulletin are the first to document a cohort-level rise in perfectionism among young people across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and they remain among the most-cited papers in the field. Subsequent work has extended this line of inquiry to the parental and cultural antecedents of perfectionism, its links to depression and anxiety, and its role in burnout across achievement domains.

He is the author of The Perfection Trap (Penguin, 2023), which integrates his empirical research with sociological and economic theory to argue that rising perfectionism reflects structural features of meritocratic capitalism rather than individual pathology. At APA, he will draw on this research programme to consider what rising perfectionism implies for young adults and society more broadly.