When people work for discriminatory managers, they put in less effort. That’s true whether managers are biased against them or when they’re biased in their favor, according to a new paper that Nicholas Heiserman of Oklahoma State University and I have published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

To demonstrate this, we placed nearly 1,200 research participants in several experiments designed to mimic work settings, where they and other “workers” made decisions about how much effort to dedicate to a task.

In some experiments, we had participants complete number searches—by counting how many times “3” appeared in a large table of numbers, for example. The more searches a participant completed, the higher their effort was rated. Participants, working in pairs or in small groups, were told that their manager would award a bonus to one person based on how many number searches the workers completed.

 …