Tom Carpenter

Dr. Tom Carpenter is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Seattle Pacific University, and is also a Data Science consultant. His areas of expertise include personality-social psychology, research methods, and statistics. His teaching focuses on introductory and advanced research methods and statistics in psychology as well as social and personality psychology. Dr. Carpenter’s research focuses on our hypocritical human nature: our propensity to ignore our overt preferences and standards and to transgress against ourselves and others. One line of research in this area focuses on implicit bias, the impulsive thoughts that can undermine our higher reasoning. Dr. Carpenter has developed new software methods for running the Implicit Association Test (IAT) using online survey software. A second line of research focuses on guilt, shame, and self-forgiveness, specifically focusing on the functions of ‘guilt-proneness’ and ‘shame-proneness’ as well as associations with the general ability to forgive the self. Finally, Dr. Carpenter has conducted research related to his area of teaching (statistics education).