Study reveals how much people sacrifice to satisfy their biases.

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.

Psychologists asked volunteers to imagine they and a partner would compete together in a trivia quiz. Participants viewed profiles of two potential partners that described each person's education, IQ and previous trivia game experience. A photograph of either a thin or an overweight person was attached to each profile. Subjects indicated which of the two potential partners they would prefer, then judged 23 more such pairings, each with a new mix of attributes.

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."