
What You Get When 30 People Draw a World Map From Memory - ycer
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/what-you-get-when-30-people-draw-a-world-map-from-memory/282901/
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x0054
I am tired of this perception around the world that americans do not know
geography. I really wish someone would do this test in Europe or Asia, and
compare the results. Are Americans terrible at geography, sure. But so is the
rest of the world, believe it or not, there are ill-educated people
everywhere.

~~~
weland
> I am tired of this perception around the world that americans do not know
> geography.

A lot of people, all over the world, suck at geography, but the degree of
suckiness itself does make a difference.

I took a similar test back in high school. It was as part of a set of
workshops, organised on the occasion of my country of origin joining the EU. I
think I saw close to a hundred maps of the world drawn in a similar manner, by
young high school students, with a fairly diverse educational background (it
was a public school, and there is no income differentiation between them --
schools were financed solely based on the number of pupils).

There was plenty of eurocentrism in them, _but_ notably:

* NONE OF THEM MISSED FUCKING JAPAN. HOW THE FUCK DO YOU MISS JAPAN? Forget about Pearl Harbour and the bombs the US dropped there and all that -- but there's anime and tentacle porn and cyberpunk and Japanese cars.

* None of them missed Greenland. How the fuck do you miss Greenland? It's a huge fucking white spot straight near Canada, it's literally impossible to miss it. The only way you can miss Greenland is if you never fucking looked at a world map.

* None of them simply warped Asia and Africa. That's probably because of a peculiarity of language -- there is a strong distinction in my native tongue between the Asian continent and the peninsulae in the Middle East. Some students did miss one or two of the unspeakable number of seas in there, but the Arabian peninsula could clearly be seen as such, and it was distinct from the Indian subcontinent.

* None of them missed... Madagascar. How the fuck do you miss Madagascar? There's a movie with cute penguins made after it!

Notable omissions were the myriad of isles between Indonesia and Australia,
the Behring strait was usually larger than it should have been (probably
because it gets skewed in different manners under different map projections),
the Carribean islands were all joined into a single, large Cuba and Kamchatka
was absent in about a third of those maps. But honestly, none of them sucked
that badly, those don't even look like Earth.

~~~
rtx
* Bering strait

~~~
weland
Oops :). Yeah, no H in Vitus Bering's name.

------
malloreon
And here's what you get when Senator Al Franken draws the United states from
memory.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0-FYyuvrRk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0-FYyuvrRk)
(sped up)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDZmDGRk1k0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDZmDGRk1k0)
(real time with commentary)

~~~
dmix
And here's what you get when Congressmen Hank Johnson asks if an island, Guam,
will capsize and tip over if overly populated.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesSRfXqS1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cesSRfXqS1Q)

~~~
sachingulaya
He suffers from hepatic encephalopathy secondary to hepatitic C infection.

------
tsotha
>... Ziebell approached 29 strangers on the University of Michigan's campus,
handed them a pen and half a sheet of paper, and asked them, on the spot, to
draw a map of the world.

Meh. College students. For most people that age this kind of stuff just isn't
that important.

~~~
DanBC
It'd be interesting to replicate the experiment using lany people of different
ages and in different countires.

I know that I'd suck at this.

------
nickbyfleet
Apparently no one knows about New Zealand.

~~~
vacri
Perhaps the paper needed to be slightly wider on the right-hand side?

~~~
etfb
That's typical, always blaming the paper. The world needs to be skinnier,
dammit!

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emiljbs
When I was 13 my social sciences teacher got my class to draw the world map
with the intent to do it again two years later with the theory that our
drawings would have become more specified as we learnt more about the world.

Unfortunately, he lost the original drawings.

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viggity
as a control, I'd be interest to see how people do drawing the same map when
they can see a reference map as they're drawing. perhaps people just suck at
drawing? That is obviously true to some extent, but how much so?

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blueskin_
I'm interested in how ocean width affects merging of landmasses- while the UK
is missing as a distinct landmass, there's a lot of blurred overlap in the
UK/scandinavia area - if some kind of averaging is used, the relatively close
sea distances may be eliminated by people getting them in differing wrong
locations. It also looks like something similar happened to Japan and India.

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thret
This would be more interesting if they only polled people who could draw.
Maybe ask them to draw a horse first, and if it's recognisable as a horse,
then continue on with the world map.

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damian2000
He would have been better off asking the 29 participants to vote on who drew
the best map - I'm sure they would have voted for his one, which was more
accurate than the averaged one.

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codezero
Is this a Mercator projection? A big problem with how people think of maps is
what projection it is. This would probably turn out very different if people
drew on globes.

~~~
ksk
>This would probably turn out very different if people drew on globe

How would it turn out ?

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bobowzki
It's quite interesting they are all drawing the same projection. The
projection can really skew your sense of proportion.

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husted
I don't think this has anything to do with poor geography skills.

Just ask a number of people to draw a normal bike and you get all sort of
strange drawings, just look at this page:
[http://bikedrawings.tumblr.com/](http://bikedrawings.tumblr.com/)

It's hard to visualize anything.

~~~
dagw
I saw a similar test a while back where people were asked to draw the handicap
parking sign. A really simple shape that most people see several times a week
if not every day. And many people couldn't even to that. Most people realized
their drawing looked obviously wrong, but could not point to what was wrong.
As you say, visualizing things, even simple things, is hard for most people.

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V-2
How exactly were they approached? Were they told what the purpose is? These
rough sketches could be a result of ignorance of course, but how do you know
it's not that someone just couldn't be bothered... "Draw you a map? okay,
whatever"

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lvh
I actually think these maps are pretty great for something that you asked
people on a campus to sketch; they had no reason to do extraordinarily well,
and many of them were probably rushing off somewhere.

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etfb
I mainly came here to see how long it would take for someone to link to the
XKCD cartoon, because it's quicker than thinking of a keyword to find it
myself.

~~~
etfb
OK, weird. Nobody else has linked to it as far as I can see. Right, it falls
to me then, as the official designated representative of nobody in particular:

[http://xkcd.com/850/](http://xkcd.com/850/)

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jessaustin
Shockingly, non-USAsians get a case of teh butthurt. "Americans aren't aware
of the shape/location/existence of my country! Grrr!"

It's a cool pre-college art project, though.

