Racial Names Mostly Signal Race, Not Socioeconomic Clues

📌 Why This Question Matters

Experiments that study racial discrimination often use racially distinctive names to signal race. Those experiments rely on the excludability assumption: that responses to a name reflect reactions to the individual's putative race rather than other name-linked information. Testing this assumption is crucial for interpreting results from name-based audit experiments.

📂 How Names' Other Signals Were Measured

A large audit study with many aliases was combined with detailed public records to measure the nonracial information each name might convey. These records were used to capture signals about:

• socioeconomic status, and
• political resources

that a given name could plausibly send to a survey or email recipient.

🔍 How the Test Was Performed

The audit study was reanalyzed to assess whether the measured socioeconomic and political-resource signals predict legislators' likelihood of responding. The analysis asks whether variation in these nonracial signals explains response behavior above and beyond the name's putative race.

✅ Key Findings

• No evidence was found that legislators' responses were driven by the socioeconomic or political-resource signals carried by names.
• The measured nonracial signals did not predict legislators' likelihood of responding in the reanalysis.

⚖️ What This Means

These results provide empirical support for the excludability assumption underpinning the use of racially distinctive names in experiments. In other words, the evidence suggests that, in this context, racially distinctive names function primarily as signals of race rather than of other socioeconomic or political characteristics—strengthening confidence in the internal validity of name-based discrimination studies.