I study the social contexts of decision making, and specifically decisions that involve ethical questions such as fairness, equity, trust, and integrity. My research highlights the critical impact of an actor’s agency on decision making. For example, I showed that people experience ‘inequity aversion’ as well as ‘inequity responsibility aversion.’ When they were asked to distribute vouchers for coffee and cake, people were willing to break with equity and give one person more vouchers than to others if the selection of that one person was random. They were not willing to decide who would “benefit” from the inequality they were creating.

Tom uses economic games, behavioral paradigms and process tracing techniques such as eye-tracking and mouse-tracking to uncover the thinking processes underlying such decisions.

More information on Tom’s personal website