Land Acknowledgements Boost Awareness but Not Support for Reparations, Experiments Find

Land acknowledgements have become one of the most visible rituals of institutional life in Australia and, increasingly, the United States. From university lecture halls and sporting arenas to corporate receipts and award ceremonies, formal statements recognizing Indigenous custodianship of land now precede countless public events. Proponents have long argued that these statements do real work: they raise awareness of Indigenous histories, disrupt settler narratives of empty land, and build public support for reparative policies. Critics, by contrast, have dismissed them as moral exhibitionism, cheap symbolic gestures that substitute for material change. Until now, however, the debate has been conducted largely without causal evidence. A new randomized experimental study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Lachlan McNamee of Monash University and Kyle Peyton of the University of Melbourne provides some of the first rigorous tests of what land acknowledgements actually do to the non-Indigenous people who hear them, and the results complicate both the enthusiasm of advocates and the fury of detractors.

The research team conducted large-scale randomized survey experiments on representative samples of non-Indigenous adults in Australia, with 1,724 participants, and the United States, with 1,773 participants. In these experiments, respondents were randomly assigned to read a land acknowledgement or a comparable text without the acknowledgement, allowing the researchers to isolate the causal effect of exposure. This design matters because most previous claims about land acknowledgements, in either direction, rested on correlational evidence or theoretical argument. By randomly assigning exposure, the researchers could measure whether the statements themselves shift awareness, attitudes, or political preferences, rather than merely observing that people who like land acknowledgements also hold particular views.

The findings on awareness are the clearest positive result. Exposure to a land acknowledgement measurably increased participants’ awareness of local Indigenous groups, confirming one of the central claims made by proponents. In a society where Indigenous presence has historically been erased from public space, the simple act of naming the traditional custodians of the land does appear to convey real information to audiences. For institutions hoping that a land acknowledgement at least teaches people something about whose land they occupy, the experiments offer support. The effect is modest but genuine, and it held across both the Australian and American samples, suggesting the mechanism is not unique to the country where the practice originated.

Yet the same experiments produced a result that advocates will find harder to celebrate: exposure to land acknowledgements reduced participants’ interest in Indigenous culture and heritage. Rather than inspiring curiosity or engagement, the statements appear to have functioned as a kind of closure, a ritual that signals the relevant box has been checked. The researchers suggest this pattern is consistent with the idea that symbolic recognition can satisfy a psychological need for moral completeness, leaving audiences less motivated to learn more. If a land acknowledgement tells people that Indigenous presence has been duly recognized, the implicit message may be that no further personal engagement is required. This backfire effect on cultural interest is among the most striking findings of the study and raises difficult questions about how such statements are framed and delivered.

On the political questions that matter most to proponents, the results were null. The experiments found no significant effects of land acknowledgement exposure on a range of attitudes, including collective guilt for historical wrongdoing and support for reparations. This null result is substantively important. The theory underlying many land acknowledgements holds that recognition is a first step on a path toward material redress, that naming dispossession cultivates the moral emotions and political will needed for compensation and structural reform. The experimental evidence does not support that causal chain, at least in the short term and for the general non-Indigenous public. Hearing that an event is taking place on the land of a particular Indigenous nation did not make Australians or Americans more willing to back financial reparations or other corrective policies.

The study went beyond audience effects to examine the incentives facing the institutions that adopt these practices. In a second set of experiments involving 3,638 participants, the researchers tested how the adoption of land acknowledgements affects public perceptions of organizations, particularly institutions facing scrutiny over their treatment of Indigenous peoples. The results showed that adopting a land acknowledgement provides small but real reputational benefits, improving assessments of an organization’s corporate social responsibility. In other words, the practice works, at least modestly, as a reputational signal for the organizations that perform it. This finding aligns with long-standing theories in sociology about institutional isomorphism, the process by which organizations in a field adopt similar practices to maintain legitimacy, and with signaling theory, which treats costly and symbolic displays as information about an actor’s qualities.

Crucially, the reputational payoff of land acknowledgements paled next to that of costlier actions. When the researchers compared symbolic statements with substantive practices, such as providing financial compensation to Indigenous communities or including Indigenous people in organizational decision-making, the costlier measures produced significantly larger improvements in perceived social responsibility. This contrast is analytically powerful because it separates the signaling value of cheap talk from the signaling value of genuine sacrifice. Audiences, it turns out, can tell the difference between an organization that says something and one that gives something up. A land acknowledgement costs an institution almost nothing, and its reputational return is correspondingly small; compensation and shared authority cost a great deal, and their reputational return is correspondingly large.

Taken together, the findings suggest that land acknowledgements primarily serve the interests of the institutions that adopt them rather than the Indigenous communities they name. The practice improves organizational reputation at minimal cost, modestly informs audiences about Indigenous presence, but does not build support for reparative politics and may even dampen interest in Indigenous cultures. The authors characterize this as evidence that land acknowledgements generate reputational benefits rather than sociopolitical change. That conclusion does not mean the statements are meaningless, and the researchers are careful to note that awareness effects are real. But it does mean that the strongest claims made on behalf of the practice, that it builds momentum for justice, are not supported by causal evidence, and the sharpest claims of critics, that it is mere performance, receive considerable experimental backing.

The study arrives at a moment of intense contestation over symbolic politics in settler states. In Australia, the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum demonstrated how fraught questions of Indigenous recognition have become, with the failed constitutional proposal exposing deep divisions over what recognition should entail. In the United States, land acknowledgements have spread from academic settings to professional sports, entertainment, and corporate life, drawing both praise and mockery. The new research speaks directly to this debate by showing that the symbolic and the substantive are not interchangeable: audiences reward substance more than symbolism, and symbolism alone does not move political attitudes. For Indigenous advocates, the implication may be that land acknowledgements are best treated not as ends in themselves but as openings that must be paired with demands for participation and compensation. For institutions, the message is starker: if the goal is genuine reconciliation rather than reputational management, the evidence points toward the expensive, disruptive practices that share power and resources, not the well-intentioned paragraph read at the start of the meeting.

The methodological rigor of the study strengthens these conclusions. The experiments were pre-registered in design logic, conducted on large samples across two countries, and analyzed using open-source statistical software, with all replication data and code deposited in a public Dataverse repository. The researchers also employed equivalence testing and heterogeneous treatment effect analysis to probe whether subgroups responded differently, and the consistency of results across the Australian and American contexts suggests the findings are not artifacts of a single political culture. As debates over diversity practices, corporate social responsibility, and symbolic recognition continue to intensify worldwide, this study offers a template for how such contested practices can be evaluated empirically rather than ideologically. Its central lesson is uncomfortable for everyone in the debate: words of recognition are heard, remembered briefly, and then absorbed into the routine of institutional life, while the work of justice, as Indigenous communities have long argued, happens only when resources and authority actually change hands.

Subject of Research: Experimental effects of Indigenous land acknowledgements on non-Indigenous audiences and institutional reputation in Australia and the USA

Article Title: Effects of land acknowledgements on non-Indigenous audiences in Australia and the USA

Article References: McNamee, L., & Peyton, K. (2026). Effects of land acknowledgements on non-Indigenous audiences in Australia and the USA. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02520-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02520-6

Keywords: land acknowledgements, Indigenous recognition, reparations, collective guilt, Australia, United States, randomized experiments, corporate social responsibility, symbolic politics, institutional isomorphism, signaling theory, Nature Human Behaviour