What You Get When 30 People Draw a World Map From Memory | Hacker News Reader

What You Get When 30 People Draw a World Map From Memory

theatlantic.com

49 pointsycer46 comments

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.

> there are ill-educated people everywhere

I agree. I also believe the education system being what it is in America compared to other developed countries, the percentage of poorly educated people in America is higher than other countries.

I agree. I am an Indian and if I catch hold of random people on a street and ask them to pin point America on a map, I am sure majority of them won't be able to. Hell people can't even identify Indian states on a map of India! It is really unfair to label Americans as being geographically unaware.

I don't see what all the fuss is about. People complaining about their spec of land being missing, mostly. If I was asked to draw a map of the world from memory in a few minutes, I'm pretty sure I'd omit a few peninsula's and islands. I'm also pretty sure I'd have omitted the south pole.

Also, people seem not to register the fact that this is an averaged map, and since the positions of islands and peninsula's will vary wildly from drawing to drawing, it's pretty obvious those will be masked.

Everything considered, I think the result is rather encouraging. I'm sure that if I did the same experiment with university students only in my home town, the results wouldn't be much better...

I don't see what all the fuss is about. People complaining about their spec of land being missing, mostly.

Kind of, I don't think any fuss is required either. They do have some of the individual maps in the article and while I'm from the UK what gets me is not just that the UK is seemingly often entirely omitted. Or New Zealand on completely the other side of the globe or India and it's 1.2 billion people. What gets me is that the outlines of the US seem worse than I'd be embarrassed to muster as neither a geographer nor an artist.

It doesn't really matter and I'm certainly not going to draw any conclusions from 29 people doing this, but whenever it comes up it doesn't paint a good picture, literally it seems.

In most EU scolarships, you're taught geography very long, even if that has nothing to do with your primary subject of study.

I've been a European student (FR) who spent a year in a US high school so I see the differences between the two populations. Simply put: average world citizen is not very good with geography, and average US citizen is noticeably worse.

I second that. In EU countries I've lived in (a dozen), knowing European geography out of secondary school was mandatory, and I can name at least one of them (Hungary) where knowing the location, name and capital name of all counteies is expected to make it out of high school.

In contrast, I've found it common to run into US citizens who can't place a dozen States on a map of their own country, let alone a dozen other countries on a world map. A few even had trouble naming, of all things, the two countries that the US shares land borders with.

"Terrible at geography" is not binary state; it may well be true that Americans (on average) are worse than most others, while having absolutely brilliant scholars.

High standard deviation.

Plus I believe the real stereotype of Americans is being ignorant of geopolitical issues, dumb bigoted nationalists. Nobody really cares whether you draw some obscure peninsula correctly or not.

> 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.

* Bering strait

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

A test taken in a high school is different from a guy walking across the campus asking people who might want to be somewhere to draw a map for them. If you notice here: http://imgur.com/a/1w6fC

Most of them didn't seem to spend more than a few seconds to draw the map, if you made them sit down and have them draw the map the results might be different.

If you look at it, I am sure you would notice that all of the maps, except for the example one by the artist himself, were drawn with continuous pen strokes. I bet that none of the test participants took more than 30 seconds to draw the maps. This wasn't a test, people taking it didn't give a shit. You DID. Further, I was born in Ukraine. I grew up in USSR, and went to the school for gifted kids. If I was asked to draw a map of the world in 1 minute or less in 6th grade, I couldn't do much better. I am sure neither could any of my classmates. I guess USSR educational system was terrible too....

Agreed. I'm currently sailing around Asia and the people I meet mostly have heard of either Texas or California, but they have no idea where they are. Those two states aren't countries per se, but I believe it's on par for this discussion. Where North America is dominated by three countries, it's not hard for someone else in the world to figure those out. When many countries are smaller than American states, one can see why it might be difficult for Americans to know the geography of another continent.

If I get a chance and strike up a good conversation with some people who are willing to do this, I'll share it. Don't hold you're breath though, I don't get to spend much time in port.

Comparable countries in terms of size and number of states are Russia, China, India etc., yet I would imagine that most people in the West would know only handful of states within these countries, if you're lucky.

ObHumility Note: I am Australian, and I suck at geography so much that, had I been born a woman, if I tried this challenge then a man watching me would say "gee, women suck at geography!" (Link for anyone not getting the reference: http://xkcd.com/385/)

I thought it was hilarious above all else.

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

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

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

Wow, that's pretty impressive!

I've always liked geography, but definitely lack the photographic memory for something like this.

That is impressive. I feel like i need an overlay of the US to see where and how much he deviates. But what projection [0] to compare to.

[0] http://xkcd.com/977/

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

The worst part is, that man is still a congressmen! 3 years later!

He suffers from hepatic encephalopathy secondary to hepatitic C infection.

He was clearly joking.

That appears to be something he'd rehearsed in advance.

>... 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.

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.

Apparently no one knows about New Zealand.

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

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

This surprises me. I thought New Zealand was a prominent part of the world map. All maps have included much less distinctive areas.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

How would it turn out ?

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

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/

It's hard to visualize anything.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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/

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.

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