Megan Bruun
Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
Social psychology, prejudice reduction, stereotypes, anti-transgender bias
2024, Ph.D. in Social Psychology, University of Wisconsin - Madison
2018, M.S. in Psychological Science, Montana State University
2015, B.S. in Psychology, University of Oregon
Teaching
I teach the following topics: social psychology, prejudice/stereotyping, and human sexuality. In all courses I teach I aim to create an environment of empowerment, community, trust, challenge, and engagement. My style involves active facilitation and guided collaborative teaching in relationship and community with my students. I support them as they think critically for themselves. As pedagogical scholar Paulo Freire says: “The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”
Research
I am currently empirically testing interventions to reduce prejudice with a special focus on unintentional bias and anti-transgender prejudice. I use laboratory research to inform interventions, focusing on understanding the mechanisms leading to prejudiced attitudes and behaviors and examining perceptions of marginalized groups.
I am currently working on three main projects:
- A multiple study replication and extension of work by Moss-Racusin and Rabasco (2018), examining the boundary conditions of imagined intergroup contact to reduce anti-transgender hiring bias.
- A theoretical paper proposing the cognitive difficulty of gender categorizing non-binary people as a mechanism underlying non-binary prejudice.
- Leading a longitudinal 800+ participant assessment of an updated Prejudice Habit Breaking Intervention.