Abstract
Intergroup biases perpetuate social inequality. Although racial bias is a part of daily life, individuals vary in their goals for bias regulation. Bias regulation can be a useful process to set, strive, and evaluate progress toward bias regulation goals. This dissertation work provides the first investigation into when and how White individuals regulate their biases in daily life, examining the different strategies that are employed across individuals and situations. These strategies include situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation. In December 2024, 236 age-diverse White adults completed a baseline and seven daily assessments. The baseline captured general bias regulation strategies and various individual difference measures of interest that were relevant to bias regulation, such as bias awareness, social dominance orientation, and internal and external motivations to respond without prejudice. Daily, participants reported on their interracial experiences with Black people, their emotions, bias, and daily bias regulation strategies. The current study advances our understanding of intergroup relations by exploring how a process model of bias regulation strategies functions at the daily level for White individuals. First, it demonstrated that bias regulation can be assessed at the daily level. Second, it showed that, overall, individuals tend to use situation modification less than other regulatory strategies to meet their bias regulation goals. Third, this work showed that how individuals think they would regulate their bias generally varies from how they report regulating their biases daily in various intergroup situations. Importantly, there were no significant differences in any of the bias regulation strategies comparing in-person to virtual contexts. Fourth, bias regulation showed divergent and convergent validity with many relevant individual differences but also importantly demonstrated that this new daily measure of bias regulation strategies is capturing something unique from pre-existing intergroup-related measures. Finally, bias regulation strategy use was consistently associated with positive and negative emotional experiences, demonstrating that bias regulation is also often a complex affective experience for many individuals. These results provide important insights for beginning to understand how bias regulation operates in daily life, laying the groundwork for improving intergroup experiences and relationships.
Committee Chair
Patrick Hill
Committee Members
Maria Gendron; Michael Strube; Seanna Leath; Tammy English
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
Psychology
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
5-2-2025
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/xnr2-yc84
Author's ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2799-4506
Recommended Citation
Beatty, Jennifer Frances, "Bias Regulation Strategy Selection in Daily Life: Using Daily Diary Methodology to Study Personal Bias Regulation Strategies" (2025). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 3476.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/xnr2-yc84