Research Interests

My first line of research is focused on how schools contribute to inequality in society.

 

During my PhD, I experimentally looked at when and why teachers discriminate against lower social class students; 2013-2018; (Autin et al., 2015; 2019; Batruch et al., 2017; 2019a; 2019b).  ​During my postdocs at the University of Queensland (AUS) and at the University of Amsterdam (2017-2019), I continued working on both institutional (i.e., teacher discrimination; Batruch, Geven et al., 2022; Batruch, et al., 2026) and psychological (i.e., beliefs in school meritocracy; Batruch et al., 2022) processes accounting for social class inequality in schools and society.

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I came back to the University of Lausanne in 2019 to work on a nation-wide large-scale longitudinal experiment (> 100 schools) on the effects of jigsaw puzzle classroom on performance and socio-emotional outcomes for French high-school students (N > 10,000; Mella et al., 2021; Rudmann et al., 2024, Riant et al., 2024).

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My second line of research delves into the how social class affects one's relations to others.

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Since then, I received a SNSF Spark grant to conduct a large-scale (N > 30,000) and theoretically comprehensive (35 effects) replication project to advance and refine the theoretical framework of psychological models of social class. The project became a registered report published in Nature Human Behaviour (Batruch, Sommet & Autin, 2025).

 

In 2024, I joined the LIVES Centre as a SNSF Ambizione researcher (2024-2028) to work on  social class in a lifecourse perspective. I examine how change in social class affects interdependence. The first paper in this lifecourse perspective uses propensity score matching to analyze whether educational mobility (first-generation students transition to University) affects personality change (Batruch &  van Scheppingen, 2025).

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