Do Name-Based Treatments Violate Information Equivalence? Evidence from a Correspondence Audit Experiment

Abstract

Name-based treatments have been used in observational studies and experiments to study the differential effect of identity—commonly race or ethnic minority status. These treatments are typically assumed to signal only a single characteristic. If names unintentionally signal other characteristics, then the treatment can violate information equivalence, and estimated treatment effects cannot be attributed to the desired characteristic alone. Using results from a name perception study paired with an original correspondence audit experiment of U.S. state legislators, we show that names manipulate perceptions of minority status, socioeconomic status (SES), and migrant status. Our audit study shows that low SES status is related to reply rates both across and within each racial category. These results provide evidence that discrimination cannot be easily attributed singularly to the intended treatment of minority status but rather reflect a more multifaceted form of discrimination. More generally, our results provide an example of how name-based treatments manipulate more than the intended characteristic, which means that estimated treatment effects cannot be interpreted as being manipulated solely by the desired characteristic. Future studies with name-based or other informational treatments should account for the potential violation of information equivalence in their research design and interpretation of results.

Racially Distinctive Names Signal Both Race/Ethnicity and Social Class

“…Two recent studies examined respondents' perceptions of social class using names (Barlow and Lahey 2018;Landgrave and Weller 2022). Although these studies move the literature forward in multiple ways, they still leave many important questions unanswered.…”

“…In the second study, the authors use a moderate sample size of respondents through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Still, they only examine respondents' perceptions of 12 total names-all male, four White, four Black, and four Hispanic (Landgrave and Weller 2022). Thus, the current literature in this area has two important limitations.…”

The Party Replies: Examining Local Party Responsiveness to Prospective Campaign Volunteers

“…In contrast to the race and gender treatments, our treatments for working class and ideology did not lead to statistically different response rates. 3 The class treatment may present an informational equivalence problem (Landgrave and Weller 2022). In addition to signaling class, for example, attending college or working may also signal age or availability.…”

Do black lives matter to employers? A combined field and natural experiment of racially disparate hiring practices in the wake of protests against police violence and racial oppression

“…Our selection of putatively Black and White names was guided by prior methodological work on audit studies, particularly work by Gaddis [ 24 ]. The extent to which these names solely signal race rather than additional characteristics such as socioeconomic status is an important consideration for assessing the validity of our inferences about racial discrimination [ 24 , 25 ]. Accordingly, we provide a detailed rationale for our selection of these names in our S1 File .…”