Do some drivers view cyclists as less than human? A new Australian study suggests that could be the reason behind road rage incidents involving drivers and cyclists.

The study, published in the journal Transportation Research in April, found drivers who dehumanized people on bikes is correlated to their self-reported aggressive behavior toward cyclists.

Narelle Haworth, co-author of the study, called the findings concerning but not shocking.

"We weren't suprised that lots of people reported agressive acts towards cylcists because cyclists report that themslves," she told CTVNews.ca over the phone.

Researchers asked 442 Australians -- including self-reported cyclists -- to rank the average cyclist on a scale from human to ape.

Because of some drivers’ propensity to disparagingly compare cyclist to vermin, the team also had participants rank cyclists on another scale from cockroach to humans.

In both models, more than half of participants didn’t consider cyclists to be fully human. It found that if participants were cyclists themselves, they were more likely to humanize other cyclists.

Self-defined cyclists rated the average cyclist as 70 per cent human according to their combined score, while non-cyclists only rated the average cyclists as 45 per cent human.

Haworth said this finding was suprising for her team. She suggested the reason for cyclists’ animosity towards fellow cyclists could be the perception that people in full biking gear tend to move dangerously fast on the road.

But disparaging comparisons of cyclists to pests or sub-humans was just scratching the surface.

In the study, researchers hypothesized that that this dehumanization is directly connected to how some drivers will act towards cyclists they’re sharing the road with.

In the paper:

17 per cent of participants admitted they had used their vehicle to block a person riding on a bike

11 per cent of people said they’d purposefully driven close to cyclists

9 per cent of people also said they’ve cut cyclists off

The perception of cyclists could be impacting the number of cyclists on the road. In 2017, the Ministry of Transportation found there were 36 fatalities in Canada.

A 2017 Statistics Canada report -- which looked at deaths related to cycling between 1994 and 2012 -- found there were a total of 1,408 recorded deaths during that time frame. This works out to about 74 accidents per year.

And this doesn’t include the annual average of 7,500 serious injuries cyclists experienced on the road, Canadian Automobile Association found.

The ape-human scale the participants used for the study is similar to one researchers used in 2015 to determine the rates at which people dehumanized marginalized groups, particularly black and Muslim people.