"When making complex decisions, legitimate factors sometimes mask choices influenced by prejudice
-so bias is hard to detect. Recent research untangled some of these complex scenarios
revealing that people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to fulfill their subconscious biases...
Teasing out which variables affected people’s choices, the researchers found that participants
were willing to sacrifice 12 IQ points in a trivia partner to have one who was thin.
In a similar experiment, the group found that when comparing successive pairs of job offers,
study subjects were willing to take a 22 percent salary cut to have a male boss...
“There’s a price to pay for biases that we may not even be aware of,”
says lead author Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago.
“If you take a lower salary in order to have a male boss or
you choose a partner who has a lower IQ but is thin,
the person you’re discriminating against is yourself.”,
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=decision-making-suffers