As is typical of trolley-problem studies, a majority of subjects said they’d pull the lever, but the name of the individual played a role in the decision. The shares of participants who decided to sacrifice the white Mark and the Asian Mark were about 68 percent and 70 percent, respectively; subjects were more likely to divert the train to hit Xian, which they chose to do 78 percent of the time.

Of course, there are limits to hypothetical ethical dilemmas (and to research conducted using Mechanical Turk), but these effects appear in the real world too. In previous research, Zhao and Biernat found that white professors were more likely to respond to an emailed request from a Chinese student when the student went by Alex, as opposed to Xian. And a separate paper found that Chinese job seekers received more favorable responses from employers when they went by anglicized names. (Other research has noted similar difficulties that arise for black job applicants.)

A lot of research on immigration and names examines the subject from an economic perspective. A 2016 paper in the American Sociological Review looked at the first names given to the generation that came after the wave of immigration to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. “Native-born sons of Irish, Italian, German, and Polish immigrant fathers who were given very ethnic names ended up in occupations that earned, on average, $50 to $100 less per year than sons who were given very ‘American’ names,” the researchers wrote. “This represented 2 to 5 percent of annual earnings.” (They determined the “ethnic-ness” or “American-ness” of a name based on how frequently it was given in each immigrant and native-born population at the time.)

Some of this effect, the researchers estimated, was due to class differences among parents (which remain a strong determinant of a child’s future job prospects), but most of it had to do with the symbolism of the name itself. Interestingly, the economic advantage that came with having a “more American” name still applied to people with surnames that clearly indicated their parents’ foreign origins. The researchers surmised that American-sounding first names, then, functioned more as a signal of “an effort to assimilate” than a means of “hiding one’s origins.”

Immigrants in that era frequently felt pressured to change their own first name. A separate study, also from 2016, found that “at any given time between 1900 and 1930,” about 77 percent of immigrants had an American-sounding first name, and it was the norm for them to have dropped their original name within a year of entering the U.S. There were economic overtones here too: Male immigrants were more likely to change their name if they lived in counties where other immigrants had trouble getting jobs.

Researchers in other countries, such as Germany and Sweden, have also used first names as a proxy for assimilation, and picked up on similar economic consequences. Three researchers in Europe estimated that in France, between 2003 and 2007, there would have been more than 50 percent more babies born with an Arabic name if there weren’t an economic penalty associated with having one.