Never order the wine during a job interview over dinner

Researchers say that prospective employees who order wine at a lunch or dinner interview are seen as less intelligent and are less likely to be hired.

If you're having a dinner or lunch interview with a potential employer, you'd be wise to order nothing harder than a soft drink.

A new report from the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania found that seeing someone holding a glass of wine caused the observers "to expect cognitive impairment," reports Reuters.

"Merely holding an alcoholic beverage may reduce the perceived intelligence of the person," Scott Rick and Maurice Schweitzer wrote.

In the experiment, the researchers asked 610 middle managers at U.S. companies to watch a series of videos in which actors portrayed a hiring manager and a prospective employee who was being interviewed over dinner. In the videos, the two were seen ordering either Coke of Merlot.

Managers who watched the videos said the prospective employee who ordered the wine was seen as less worthy of being hired and less "intelligent, scholarly and intellectual," no matter what the manager in the video ordered.

The researchers dubbed the tendency to look negatively on the wine drinker as the "imbibing idiot bias."