Washington, April 26 (IANS) Psychologists have found that people may make economic and sensitive decisions based on unintentional racial biases.

"Decisions in the worlds of business, law, education, medicine and even more ordinary daily interactions between individuals, all rely on trust," wrote researchers led by Elizabeth Phelps, professor at the New York University.

"In an increasingly globalized economy, that trust must be forged between individuals who differ in background, shared experiences and aspirations," they added, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports.

"These results provide evidence that decisions we may believe to be consciously determined are, in fact, not entirely so, and suggest that this may have a very real cost for individuals and society," they note, according to a New York statement.

Employing a commonly used Implicit Association Test (IAT), researchers asked 50 racially diverse participants to rate the trustworthiness of individuals depicted in just under 300 photographs of black, white, Asian, Hispanic, and mixed race men on a scale from one (not-at-all trustworthy) to nine (extremely trustworthy).

The participants were instructed to report their initial "gut impressions". Researchers found the participants' implicit race attitudes, measured in a subsequent test, predicted disparities in the perceived trustworthiness of black and white faces.

Individuals whose tests demonstrated a stronger pro-white implicit bias were more likely to judge white faces as more trustworthy than black faces, and vice versa, regardless of that individual's own race.