Clearly the map wasn't coloured to differentiate bodies of water, considering the clusters in the Black and Caspian seas. (But you'd think people could at least identify the major oceans...)
"In general, younger Americans tended to provide more accurate responses than their older counterparts: 27 percent of 18-24 year olds correctly identified Ukraine, compared with 14 percent of 65+ year-olds."
65+ year olds spent a big chunk of their lives in the cold war. Presumably they would know more about the geographical breakup of the Soviet Union than 18-24 year olds who didn't even exist when the Berlin Wall fell.
From a data analysis standpoint, I would say discard the outliers that look like mis-clicks. Based on the groupings you still have people that identified Alaska, Greenland, Canada, India South America, and so on. Irregardless of the colorings or map size, those should not have been chosen.
On another note, a given countries foreign policy always makes a hell of a lot more sense when placed in context on a map. I'm glad I read a lot of National Geographic as a child.
Many of the maps I remember seeing (in school and otherwise) as a kid in the 1980s labelled the constituent republics of the USSR.
The point is, if you know where Russia is, you likely know where Ukraine is. The clicking at random is by people who have no idea about either.
EDIT: Sorry. I meant that as a reply to your comment regarding legitimacy of the map.
I don't know about that. There are ~15 (depending on what you are counting) countries that border Russia. And while I am fairly confident that I could label them all, Russia would certainly be the easiest to label. It's the big one; it's hard to miss.
I'm the product of American public schools for what its worth. I learned the countries back in middle school, but learning the locations of countries not in North or South America was extra credit for my class (as was learnin the state capitals, and country capitals).
Incidentally, I suspect those large clusters in the central asian republics account for a large amount of the error in the median response. The lone clicks in New Zealand or whatever don't count as much as big clusters do, and those clusters are pretty near the median error of 1800 miles off.
Also, there are certainly a number (below 5%) of clicks that resulted from accident or interface understanding problems. Those could account for some of the most outlandish dots.
But then there are a lot of people that selected India. That's kind of disturbing.