Study: Drivers tend to dehumanize people riding bicycles

[TexasTowelie]

As bike friendly as the metro area can be, there are still incidents of aggression — and worse — between drivers and bike riders. Atlanta’s most well-known incident resulted in Joseph Alan Lewis being sentenced to 15 years in prison for deliberately hitting Greg Germani, who was riding his bicycle on a residential road in Morningside in 2014.

While most encounters between drivers and cyclists aren’t this extreme, researchers in Australia say they have found a link between attitudes toward bike riders and acts of deliberate aggression toward them on the road.

In a pilot test of the “dehumanization of cyclists,” researchers at Queensland University of Technology, Monash University and the University of Melbourne studied 442 people in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

Dehumanization, the group said in the study abstract, “refers to any situation where people are seen or treated as if they are less than fully human.”

Read more: https://www.ajc.com/news/study-drivers-tend-dehumanize-people-riding-bicycles/GyRITsp5FdEPOwVk7SgsTJ/