Social scientists often describe fictional people in survey stimuli using first names. However, which name a researcher chooses may elicit nonrandom impressions, which could confound results. Although past research has examined how names signal race and class, very little has examined whether names signal age, which is a highly salient status characteristic involved in person construal. I test the perceived demographics of 228 American names. I find that most strongly signal age, with older-sounding names much more likely to be perceived as white than as black. Furthermore, participants' perceptions of the age of a name poorly match with the true average birth year of people with that name, suggesting that researchers cannot simply use birth records as a proxy for perceived age. To assist researchers in name selection, I provide a set of candidate names that strongly signal a matrix of combined age, race, and gender categories.

中文翻译：

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名字叫什么年龄？

社会科学家经常使用名字在调查刺激中描述虚构的人。但是，研究人员选择的名称可能会引起非随机印象，从而可能混淆结果。尽管过去的研究已经检查了姓名如何标志种族和阶级，但是很少研究了姓名是否标志年龄，这是人建构中高度突出的地位特征。我测试了228个美国名字的人口统计特征。我发现最强烈的信号是年龄，听起来较老的名字更容易被认为是白人而不是黑人。此外，参与者对一个名字的年龄的感知与该名字的人的真实平均出生年份差得很远，这表明研究人员不能简单地使用出生记录作为感知年龄的代表。为了协助研究人员选择姓名，