I think this article is an interesting companion to the topic at hand
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-higher-education-outrage
The paper When a Name Gives You Pause: Racialized Names and Time to Adoption in a County Dog Shelter found that dogs in a shelter with names that were read as Black (e.g., Tyson) tended to be adopted more slowly than those with names that people viewed as White (e.g., Ben). The author explains the findings here.
Here is what I emailed to the reporter:
Here is why I think the study is interesting. There is a fairly substantial body of causal evidence that people discriminate based on names. These studies use experimental designs, so the causal effects can't be doubted. For example, they show that resumes with names that employers interpret as black are less likely to be called for an interview relative to more white sounding names. See, e.g. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1706255114 Another recent summary points to similar effects in rental housing, where equally qualified people are treated differently depending on their names. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3975770. There remains some question about why people respond to such names differently. Maybe they have had some prior negative experiences that provides some rationale for their responses. So I read the dog shelter study in that context. It takes away any such rationale: it's obviously silly to discriminate against dogs based on names, and so it points to an underlying bias that can't be accounted for by prior experience.
Of course, without this context, I realize it would be easy to caricature the paper as a "LOLZ these academics are studying dog discrimiantion." Which is why I tried to explain the context of a relatively sophisticated body of work in this area that needs to be accounted for to understand the contribution.