Can reading a name lead to a racist reaction? A new study from researchers at the University of California Los Angeles suggests that yes, it can. According to the findings, people tend to associate what the authors call "black-sounding names," like DeShawn and Jamal, with larger, more violent people than they do "white-sounding names," like Connor and Garrett.
In a series of studies involving more than 1,500 people, the researchers found that respondents held an unknown white man convicted of assault — an actual violent crime — and an unknown black man in equal regard in terms of size and aggression.
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In one of the studies, researchers tested people who self-identified as "slightly left of center politically," asking them to read about different scenarios in which a man acted out violently, only with certain details changed. Sometimes they gave the character a criminal history, a successful business record, or a neutral background in which they offered no details about his history. And they changed the character's name to sound like it belonged to different ethnic groups — white, black, Hispanic, and Asian.
When people were given the character's specific background (like a business record), they didn't associate stereotypically black and white names with different traits, based on their stated perceptions of the character's height, build, aggressiveness, and other factors.
But in neutral scenarios, people linked the black-sounding names (Jamal, DeShawn, or Darnell) with aggression, while the white-sounding names (Connor, Wyatt, or Garrett) received more leniency. In fact, people associated black-sounding names with neutral backgrounds as equally dangerous to white-sounding names with a criminal record.
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