Only 1 in 6 Americans Can Find Ukraine on a Map

Only 1 in 6 Americans know where Ukraine is on a map, The Washington Post‘s Monkey Cage blog reports.

Between March 28-31, a national sample of 2,066 Americans were asked to locate Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution map. In the image below, red dots represent the most accurate responses (“you’re getting warmer…”), while blue dots represent the least accurate ones.

Amazing map from @monkeycageblog shows where U.S. respondants thought Ukraine was http://t.co/abpGRjwi8u pic.twitter.com/dN76Cyk1UR

— Adam Taylor (@mradamtaylor) April 7, 2014

“Most thought that Ukraine was located somewhere in Europe or Asia, but the median respondent was about 1,800 miles off — roughly the distance from Chicago to Los Angeles — locating Ukraine somewhere in an area bordered by Portugal on the west, Sudan on the south, Kazakhstan on the east, and Finland on the north,” according to the Monkey Cage post, written by political scientists Kyle Dropp of Dartmouth College, Joshua D. Kertzer of Harvard University and Thomas Zeitzoff of Princeton University.

Younger Americans’ answers were more accurate than that of older Americans, however, 77% of college graduates still could not correctly identify the country’s location.

The point of the poll was to see how foreign policy views can be affected by people’s perceptions of where countries are located. In fact, according to the post,”The further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily.”

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