Doctors' unconscious bias may not influence their decisions

Doctors may have biases for or against people of different races and social statuses, but those unconscious views don't overtly affect the care they deliver to their patients, a new study finds. When tested with sample scenarios, most doctors showed some unconscious racial or social bias, but those biases largely did not influence their decisions about what care they would give the fictitious patients. The study's lead author told Reuters Health by email that past research has suggested a connection between unconscious biases and how patients are treated, so the new results are not definitive.