Three quarters of Australians hold a negative bias against Indigenous Australians, new analysis from the Australian National University has revealed.
Results from 11,000 Australians who took the Implicit Association Test over a 10-year period found that 75 per cent held a negative implicit or unconscious bias, regardless of their demographic. Australian report author and PhD researcher at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences Siddharth Shirodkar said the results were "shocking, but not surprising."
"Everyone who does (the test) finds it fairly confronting but that's the only way to pick up on those unconscious views," he said.
"They seep seamlessly into our decision-making."
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The Implicit Association Test measures how quickly participants respond when asked to associate historical images of Indigenous Australians and Caucasian Australians with positive and negative words.
An unconscious bias is inferred if the participant associates positive terms more quickly with Caucasian faces compared to Aboriginal faces.
The revelation comes just days after 5000 people marched through the streets of Newcastle to protest against racism and Aboriginal deaths in custody.
The test was developed in the US about 20 years ago to test unconscious racial bias and a similar test was developed for Australians 10 years ago. However, this is the first time the data set has been analysed.
The data showed a negative unconscious bias against Indigenous Australians regardless of the participants' level of education, occupation and religious affiliation.
"What was quite shocking was just how widespread that was across Australian demographics," Mr Shirodkar said.
Western Australian and Queensland participants had the highest scores for bias while those in the Northern Territory and ACT recorded the lowest levels of bias.
Caucasians were found to have the greatest levels of bias, followed by South Asians and South East Asians.
People who identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander were statistically unbiased towards either group. While the test uncovered implicit bias, Mr Shirodkar said people had the ability to be aware of it and choose not to be discriminatory.
"What this data tells me more than anything else is we need to be really conscious about how we think about each other."
