One extra criticism I'd add to your commendable list is that the pitbull subgroup analysis is literally the "do jelly beans cause cancer?" XKCD strip, where they test 20 different colours of jelly bean and find that the green ones (and only the green ones) cause cancer with confidence p = 0.05.
If you were to accept the data, then a ‘people are racist’ interpretation is possible. Other explanations are ‘non-black people are worried that having a stereotypically black dog with a stereotypically black name would make them appear racist’, or that pit bulls with black names grew up in black households, and exhibit racial preference towards humans - there’s at least weak evidence that dogs may take on the racial preferences of their owners: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/canine-corner/201909/can-dogs-be-racist . If you’re adopting a dog with the capacity to eat your face, you may be hyper-attuned to whether it appears to like you.
With the vague impression that pitbulls are sometimes raised for fighting or at least as guard dogs, I would pause on any name that seemed particularized, racially or otherwise, as maybe an indication of its prior training.
I don't think I would pick a dog based on the name, but I would probably look at Fido before Attilla, and yes where I am in the US Deep South, the black name thing goes both ways; I couldn't be out in my yard calling for Rufus or Jamaal and would probably be extra sure to ask before adopting about their prior lives.
Isn't the process of naming the dog also relevant? Like, if someone at the shelter is choosing to give undesirable dogs black-coded names, for example ... those dogs would be harder to adopt anyway, but not because of the names. That would indicate racism, but by a different party to the people adopting?
Really does turn a serious problem into a cutsie headline, doesn’t it? What’s even more embarrassing is you can still make a career in social psych with this formula — don’t pre-register, slice-and-dice the data post-hoc until you find what you were looking for, shop around for a journal, then publicize it in hopes of boosting citations with your catchy headline. You’ll get tenure somewhere.
Another problem with the Twitter thread is that it heavily implies a "racialized name -> longer adoption waits" causal path, but imo they'd need to do something like a multi-level analysis on the individual shelters to get towards that answer -- it feels pretty plausible that e.g. shelters in predominantly black areas give dogs more black-sounding names and also have longer adoption waits for non-naming reasons, like socioeconomic status.
One extra criticism I'd add to your commendable list is that the pitbull subgroup analysis is literally the "do jelly beans cause cancer?" XKCD strip, where they test 20 different colours of jelly bean and find that the green ones (and only the green ones) cause cancer with confidence p = 0.05.
If you were to accept the data, then a ‘people are racist’ interpretation is possible. Other explanations are ‘non-black people are worried that having a stereotypically black dog with a stereotypically black name would make them appear racist’, or that pit bulls with black names grew up in black households, and exhibit racial preference towards humans - there’s at least weak evidence that dogs may take on the racial preferences of their owners: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/canine-corner/201909/can-dogs-be-racist . If you’re adopting a dog with the capacity to eat your face, you may be hyper-attuned to whether it appears to like you.
With the vague impression that pitbulls are sometimes raised for fighting or at least as guard dogs, I would pause on any name that seemed particularized, racially or otherwise, as maybe an indication of its prior training.
I don't think I would pick a dog based on the name, but I would probably look at Fido before Attilla, and yes where I am in the US Deep South, the black name thing goes both ways; I couldn't be out in my yard calling for Rufus or Jamaal and would probably be extra sure to ask before adopting about their prior lives.
Isn't the process of naming the dog also relevant? Like, if someone at the shelter is choosing to give undesirable dogs black-coded names, for example ... those dogs would be harder to adopt anyway, but not because of the names. That would indicate racism, but by a different party to the people adopting?
Really does turn a serious problem into a cutsie headline, doesn’t it? What’s even more embarrassing is you can still make a career in social psych with this formula — don’t pre-register, slice-and-dice the data post-hoc until you find what you were looking for, shop around for a journal, then publicize it in hopes of boosting citations with your catchy headline. You’ll get tenure somewhere.
Also noteworthy is that this study of cats found no influence of naming on adoption waits, though they don't test for race-coded names specifically.
=> https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2615/11/1/62
Another problem with the Twitter thread is that it heavily implies a "racialized name -> longer adoption waits" causal path, but imo they'd need to do something like a multi-level analysis on the individual shelters to get towards that answer -- it feels pretty plausible that e.g. shelters in predominantly black areas give dogs more black-sounding names and also have longer adoption waits for non-naming reasons, like socioeconomic status.