Road safety and psychology experts in Australia are calling for people to avoid using the word “cyclist” after a study concluded the word dehumanises people who ride bikes and may put them at increased risk of road aggression. A new Australian research has found that more than half of car drivers think cyclists are not completely human, with a link between the dehumanisation of bike riders and acts of deliberate aggression towards them on the road. Indian junior cycling team was ranked 1st in the world not long ago. QUT professor Narelle Haworth is behind a push to scrap the word 'cyclist' and replace it with the term 'people who ride bikes'. Professor Haworth, who is also the Director of the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety- Queensland, said it was important for drivers to view cyclists as real people. 'If we used the term people on bikes, instead of cyclists, we're giving a term that is more human-like and less like a species,' Professor Haworth told Daily Mail Australia. 'We need to spread the idea that those people [cyclists] could be any of us. There is a need to grow a culture of mutual respect for people on bikes,' said Haworth. An Australian Automobile Association study released last year showed that cyclist fatalities in 2017/18 increased by 80 per cent compared with the previous 12 months.
The research, Dehumanization of cyclists predicts self-reported aggressive behaviour toward them published in Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, points that cyclists have been imagined as a minority group and a target of negative attitudes and behaviour. The study, involving 442 respondents in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, identified people's attitude to cyclists and whether they were cyclists or non-cyclists themselves. Participants in the study were given either the iconic evolution of ape to man image or an adaption of that image showing the stages of evolution from cockroach to human. Lead author Dr. Alexa Delbosc, Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Transport Studies at Monash University, said the insect-human scale was designed for the study because of the many informal stigmas against cyclists comparing them to "cockroaches" or "mosquitoes". On both ape-human and insect-human scales, 55 per cent of non-cyclists and 30 per cent of cyclists rated cyclists as not completely human. Acts of aggression towards cyclists were not uncommon, with 17 per cent saying they had used their car to deliberately block a cyclist, 11 per cent had deliberately driven their car close to a cyclist and 9 per cent had used their car to cut off a cyclist. "When you don't think someone is 'fully' human, it's easier to justify hatred or aggression towards them. This can set up an escalating cycle of resentment," Dr. Delbosc said. She added, "If cyclists feel dehumanised by other road users, they may be more likely to act out against motorists, feeding into a self-fulfilling prophecy that further fuels dehumanisation against them."The study by researchers at Monash University, Queensland University of Technology's (QUT) Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety—Queensland (CARRS-Q) and the University of Melbourne's School of Psychological Sciences, is the first study to look at a road-user group with the problem of dehumanisation, which is typically studied in relation to attitudes towards racial or ethnic groups.