The research, examined in a News & Views commentary by Raymond I. Orr of the University of California, Santa Barbara, sits at the intersection of political science and social psychology. Its central finding is a paradox: land acknowledgements raise awareness of Indigenous peoples, yet they reduce people’s interest in learning more about them. In other words, the very gesture designed to open a door may quietly close it. Readers who encountered a land acknowledgement came away more conscious that Indigenous peoples exist and have claims to the land, but less curious, less motivated to seek out further information about Indigenous history, politics or contemporary life.

To understand why this matters, it helps to situate land acknowledgements in the broader landscape of settler-state politics. Settler states, governments built on the dispossession of Indigenous populations, have historically managed Indigenous peoples through a mixture of violence, treaty-making, assimilation policy and, more recently, gestures of reconciliation. In recent decades, many of these states have shifted toward symbolic recognition: formal apologies, constitutional mentions, flags, renamed holidays and acknowledgements of traditional territory. Critics have long argued that such gestures can substitute for the transfer of political power, land or resources, offering the appearance of reconciliation without its substance. What made this critique hard to evaluate was the absence of experimental evidence about what these gestures actually do to the people who hear them.

McNamee and Peyton addressed that gap with experiments conducted in the United States and Australia, two settler states where land acknowledgements have become widespread but in different institutional contexts. By randomly assigning participants to encounter or not encounter a land acknowledgement, and then measuring their attitudes and behavioral intentions, the researchers could isolate the causal effect of the gesture itself rather than merely correlating it with pre-existing attitudes. This experimental design matters because land acknowledgements are not distributed randomly in the real world; the institutions that adopt them tend to be more progressive to begin with, making observational comparisons misleading.

The results cut in two directions at once. On the positive side of the ledger, exposure to a land acknowledgement increased awareness. Participants who read one were more likely to recognize the Indigenous presence on the land, an outcome that defenders of the practice can point to as evidence that acknowledgements do at least some of the work they promise. Erasure, after all, is not a trivial problem. Surveys in settler states repeatedly find that large shares of the public cannot name the Indigenous nations near them, and the invisibility of Indigenous peoples in everyday civic life is itself a political condition that benefits the status quo.

On the negative side, however, the same exposure reduced interest in learning more. This is where the psychological machinery becomes important. Social psychologists have described a phenomenon known as moral licensing, in which a small virtuous act gives people a sense of moral credit that licenses subsequent inaction or even less virtuous behavior. The classic formulation, developed in work by Anna Merritt, Daniel Effron and Benoît Monin, holds that expressing a good intention or performing a token good deed can function as a substitute for more costly action. A land acknowledgement, by this logic, may operate as a completed act of respect: having acknowledged the land, the audience feels that the moral work has been done, and the motivation to read Indigenous history, support Indigenous political claims or attend to Indigenous news quietly dissipates.

The Australian context adds a further layer, one that scholars of settler colonialism have explored in depth. Emma Kowal’s work on what she has called the politics of the gesture in Australia examined how official expressions of sorrow and recognition, including the national apology to the Stolen Generations, became entangled with a distinctive discomfort among white settler populations. Recognition, in that analysis, is not simply a gift from the settler state to Indigenous peoples; it is also a performance that manages the settler’s own self-image. The new experimental findings give that theoretical critique empirical teeth. If a gesture of recognition measurably lowers the audience’s appetite for further engagement, then the critique that symbolic recognition substitutes for substantive engagement is no longer just a philosophical worry. It is a documented behavioral effect.

Raymond I. Orr, who writes from the perspective of a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation of Oklahoma and a political scientist specializing in Indigenous politics, frames the findings as a challenge to both sides of the debate. For defenders of land acknowledgements, the results are a warning that good intentions are not enough and that the downstream effects of a gesture must be measured, not assumed. For critics, the results confirm that symbolic recognition can be actively counterproductive, dampening the very curiosity and engagement on which political change depends. But Orr’s commentary also points toward a more nuanced reading: the problem may not be recognition itself but recognition without follow-through, acknowledgement offered as an endpoint rather than an invitation.

That reading suggests concrete directions for institutions that have adopted or are considering land acknowledgements. If the measured effect of a standalone acknowledgement is reduced interest in learning more, then acknowledgements might be redesigned to pair the statement with an immediate, low-cost opportunity for engagement, a link to Indigenous-authored histories, an invitation to a local event, a call to support a specific political claim. The experimental paradigm that McNamee and Peyton have established makes such variations testable. Institutions could, in principle, run their own evaluations, comparing acknowledgement formats and measuring not just awareness but subsequent behavior: clicks, attendance, donations, support for policy. The study transforms land acknowledgements from a matter of etiquette into a matter of evidence.

The broader stakes extend well beyond one ritual. Symbolic recognition is now a central currency of settler-state politics, deployed in constitutions, national apologies, commemorative days and corporate marketing. Whether that currency buys real change or merely buys off the conscience of the majority is one of the defining questions of contemporary Indigenous-settler relations. McNamee and Peyton’s experiments provide the first controlled evidence that the exchange is not neutral: awareness rises, but engagement falls. As settler states continue to multiply gestures of recognition, the burden of proof now shifts to those who offer them. A land acknowledgement, the research suggests, is not a conclusion. It is, at best, a first sentence, and the experiments show that without a second one, audiences tend to stop reading.

Subject of Research: Experimental study of the effects of land acknowledgements on public awareness of and engagement with Indigenous peoples in settler states

Article Title: Recognizing Indigenous peoples

Article References: Recognizing Indigenous peoples. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-026-02619-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02619-w

Keywords: land acknowledgements, Indigenous peoples, settler states, moral licensing, political science, social psychology, symbolic recognition, Australia, United States, reconciliation, Nature Human Behaviour, experimental research