Professor Thomas studied poverty and inequality and their remedies using the insights of social psychology and lens of cultural psychology. Her research seeks to uncover social psychological processes that undermine the economic mobility of people in poverty and simultaneously depress public will to address inequality, perpetuating systems of poverty and inequality. She shows how brief social psychological interventions can interrupt these systems, particularly when those interventions are attuned to culturally specific forms of motivation (what she calls “culturally wise” interventions). In this work, she conduct lab and field experiments in the US and low- and middle-income countries, including in partnership with nonprofits and governments and with interdisciplinary teams of economists and sociologists.