Thursday, April 10, 2014

STUDY The Less Americans Know about Ukraine’s Location, the More They Want U.S. to Intervene

By political scientists Kyle Dropp (Dartmouth College) Joshua D. Kertzer (Harvard University) and  Thomas Zeitzoff  (Princeton University).

Where’s Ukraine? Each dot depicts the location where a U.S. survey respondent situated Ukraine; the dots are colored based on how far removed they are from the actual country, with the most accurate responses in red and the least accurate ones in blue

Since Russian troops first entered the Crimean peninsula in early March, a series of media polling outlets have asked Americans how they want the U.S. to respond to the ongoing situation.  Although two-thirds of Americans have reported following the situation at least “somewhat closely,” most Americans actually know very little about events on the ground — or even where the ground is.

On March 28-31, 2014, we asked a national sample of 2,066 Americans (fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc. (SSI), what action they wanted the U.S. to take in Ukraine, but with a twist: In addition to measuring standard demographic characteristics and general foreign policy attitudes, we also asked our survey respondents to locate Ukraine on a map as part of a larger, ongoing project to study foreign policy knowledge. We wanted to see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views. We found that only one out of six Americans can find Ukraine on a map, and that this lack of knowledge is related to preferences: The farther their guesses were from Ukraine’s actual location, the more they wanted the U.S.  to intervene with military force.
Ukraine: Where is it?

Survey respondents identified Ukraine by clicking on a high-resolution world map, shown above. We then created a distance metric by comparing the coordinates they provided with the actual location of Ukraine on the map. Other scholars, such as Markus Prior, have used pictures to measure visual knowledge, but unlike many of the traditional open-ended items political scientists use to measure knowledge, distance enables us to measure accuracy continuously: People who believe Ukraine is in Eastern Europe clearly are more informed than those who believe it is in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean.

About one in six (16 percent) Americans correctly located Ukraine, clicking somewhere within its borders. 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...

the further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily. Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests...


17 comments:

  1. Some say the internet (porn and kitty Youtube videos) has made us stupider or TV made us stupider or video games made us stupider. Really, we've been this stupid all along. It's just now through the internet that we learn how stupid we really are.

    Sadly, this doesn't only pertains to Americans. The only reason why Americans are thrashed in this manner because the USG is the biggest, baddest bully on the block. So, when some foreigner states that Americans are stupid because they keep invading countries (and rightly annoyed) and that Americans are not free but live in an illusion, he or she is only showing his or her stupidity. First off, the foreigner, more often than not, state this because he or she is still in the mindset that governments, actually, represent their own people. Governments are not us and we are not them. Secondly, just because his or her country doesn't invade other countries or conduct travesties like the UKG or USG, doesn't mean the government that he or she lives under would be any better if they had the power as the USG. All governments are the same it's just a matter of what their capabilities are. Just a matter of how they and how much they suckle off the dime of their own people.

    The one thing that brings us all together (worldwide) is the adherence to governments overseeing the economic policies of their country. Stupid.

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    1. "The only reason why Americans are thrashed in this manner because the USG is the biggest, baddest bully on the block."

      "The one thing that brings us all together..."

      "Stupid."

      LMAO


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  2. It is a nation of idiots.

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    1. No kidding. This is truly pathetic! Hell, I knew where Ukraine was as a CHILD, and that was before the Soviet Union collapsed. Is it really THAT hard for these people to read a map?

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    2. Oh whatever, Mike. You were one of the idiots who put a dot in the US. Your overcompensation in these comments gives you away.

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    3. "Oh whatever, Mike. You were one of the idiots who put a dot in the US. Your overcompensation in these comments gives you away."

      Little man, as usual are clueless.

      And like another poster, you would do well to follow your own advice. Oh, and save the "whatever" for the 12 year olds.

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    4. Oh, excuse me. I thought you were twelve years old, given your juvenile ranting. A product of the public education system, no doubt. That explains placing your dot in the US.

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  3. Anyone who has ever played risk or watched Seinfeld knows how to located Ukraine! They would also know how weak they are!

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    1. No kidding. I remember having to show others where France was on a map. Lol. They were inquiring as to what I was studying (Napoleon's retreat from Moscow at the time) and the subject came up.

      In fact just yesterday a friend of mine was asking me where the tiny country of Liechtenstein was (he had heard it had the highest income per capita in the world). Although in this case I don't really expect most people to know that since you never really hear it mentioned. Hell, you really can't even identify it on a map unless it's close up. I think it's only 15 miles long (North to South).

      Anyway, not knowing every tiny micro-state is really no big deal but geez, at LEAST know where France, the US, Ukraine, Russia, and the other easily recognizable states are. It's not rocket science.

      Most people are complete idiots. Why? Government "education". It doesn't teach you how to think but what to think. IOW, it's busy indoctrinating children with PC bullshit and other idiot libtard silliness.

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    2. Yet more "everyone's an idiot but me" drivel from you. When's your birthday? I'm getting you a bib.

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  4. I'm reading Rothbard's The Betrayal of the American Right and one of my favorite passages in the book so far is where Rothbard details Albert Jay Nock's views on education. Specifically, Nock was a critic of the shift from classical education to mass, compulsory education because he believed that relatively few people were suited for a rigorous classical education. He predicted that the quality of education would necessarily decline, as the education system would have to cater to the lowest common denominator and called out compulsory education as a waste of time for most people who go through the system. It's downright scary how right Nock was.

    On the post itself, thanks for putting it out there for us, Bob. This is a very interesting and useful study.

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    1. If you like Rothbard, I can't recommend reading Nock enough. You can see the influence Nock's clear, concise writing style had on Rothbard.

      Check out anything by Nock on mises.org; but I recommend The Art of Snoring, On Doing the Right Thing (for shorter essays) and A Superfluous Man, Jefferson and Our Enemy, the State (for his lengthier writings.)

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    2. Thanks for the recommendations - I look forward to reading them.

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    3. So what ever happened to "trade schools". Now a kid has to finish GUV school, get a job of some kind to raise the tuition, then attend a diesel mechanics school or some such.
      Wouldn't it be better if the GUV school TAUGHT diesel mechanics and furnished the poor slob with a decent skill set in the first place.
      Of course, that last sentence was a laugher. "Better" has nothing to do with it. :( (sigh)

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  5. Antiwar Mike seems to have acquired a follower. :)

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    1. He's not antiwar. He's just as violent as the rest of them. He just likes to hide behind a holier-than-thou libertarian label.

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  6. Adam Smith had some insights into this. (See here.)

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