No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Social Attitudes Predict Biases in Geographic Knowledge*
Abstract
Three principal components were found to underlie Texas university students' experiences with and attitudes toward Canada, the United States, and Mexico: diversity orientation, Mexican experiences, and Canadian experiences. Diversity orientation included positive attitudes toward Hispanics, Canadians, minorities, interethnic friendships, and dating and was negatively correlated with natio-centrism (e.g., believing U.S. citizens receive the world's best education). Diversity orientation and natio-centrism were not related to experiences with Mexico or Canada. Students estimated the locations of Canadian cities too far north and Mexican cities too far south. Biased estimates for Mexican cities were negatively correlated with diversity orientation, not experience with Mexico.
... Questionnaires assessing participants' perceived similarity/ familiarity/ anticipated ease of social interaction with a target group (Jones, 2004) (Swift, 1999 (Tolman, 1948;Carbon and Hesslinger, 2013). These maps are subject to systematic distortions by factors such as familiarity and emotional involvement; hence, rather than being exact physical representations of the reality, physical distance estimations reflect affective and cognitive influences (Kerkman et al., 2004) and as such can be used as indicator for social closeness. ...
... Questionnaires assessing participants' distance estimations between relevant cities/ locations/ people (e.g., Kerkman et al., 2004;Carbon and Leder, 2005;Carbon, 2010) We are interested in the socially inclusive attitudes of individuals toward their intercultural peers. Perceived social closeness is positively associated with emotional involvement (Ekman and Bratfisch, 1965), making it an essential antecedent for social inclusion (see Carbon, 2010;Carbon and Hesslinger, 2013). ...
... Cognitive maps are systematically distorted by factors such as familiarity and emotional involvement, which is why physical distance estimations, rather than being exact physical representations of the reality, reflect affective and cognitive influences and as such can be used as indicator for social closeness. As Kerkman et al. (2004) stated: "On the surface, estimating the physical locations of places would appear to be a purely cognitive task concerning physical space, but the evidence indicates that it is strongly associated with social attitudes, and may be caused by them" (p. 268). ...
The enhancement of social inclusion is a key to maintaining cohesion in society and to foster the benefits of cultural diversity. Using insights from the Dual Identity Model (DIM) with a special focus on active categorization, we develop an intervention to increase social inclusion. Our intervention encourages the participants to (re-)categorize on a superordinate level (i.e., a human identity) while being exposed to their own culture. Across a set of experiments, we test the efficacy of our intervention against control conditions on the effect of social inclusion, measured by perceived social distance. Results show an increase in cultural closeness and provide preliminary support for the use of a DIM-based intervention to increase intercultural inclusion
... Geography, as understood by ordinary people, is, in effect, experiential. It is, 'a complex domain that is learned about over the life span from a variety of eclectic sources and experiences, so reasoning about geographic entities can potentially be affected by perceptual (Huttenlocher et al., 1991), cognitive (Friedman and Brown, 2000b), and affective (Carbon and Leder, 2005;Kerkman et al., 2004) factors' (Friedman, 2009, p. 95). Proximity and location then are allocated according to a 'plausible reasoning logic' of designating spatial characteristics on the basis of non-spatial attributes, which often leads to cartographic judgments and biases. ...
... More specifically, research in cognitive mapping, going back to Castells (1996), Golledge (1997), Kerkman et al. (2004) and more recently Kweon, Hwang, and Jo (2011) justifies the claim that place and space are culturally constructed. Kerkman et al. (2004) are particularly convincing in making the claim that cultural construction of space implies association of cultural stereotypes with spatial locations. ...
... More specifically, research in cognitive mapping, going back to Castells (1996), Golledge (1997), Kerkman et al. (2004) and more recently Kweon, Hwang, and Jo (2011) justifies the claim that place and space are culturally constructed. Kerkman et al. (2004) are particularly convincing in making the claim that cultural construction of space implies association of cultural stereotypes with spatial locations. Their groundbreaking study on misperception of North-South locations at a continental scale due to cultural stereotypes is particularly germane in this context. ...
This study builds on existing work on cartographic thinking in everyday life to better understand how digital and/or traditional media influence our perceptions of continental scale geography. Using a mixed, US-Italian sample of college students living in cities on similar latitudes, we found that there is a bias in placing U.S. cities further north and European cities further south than where they should be. Such biases reflect a process of ‘plausible reasoning,’ which assumes that places are located cartographically in a biased way due to cultural-cognitive processes facilitated by media. The specific media found to be related with such biases in this study and directions for future research are discussed.
... their estimations on direct air distances (`as the crow flies'). Other influences are national (Burris and Branscombe, 2005) or regional borders (Friedman and Montello, 2006) which enlarge distances towards cities behind these borders, partly caused by culture-specific knowledge (Friedman et al, 2005) and nation centrism (Kerkman et al, 2004). Mark (1992) assumed weather and climate factors as additional predictors for latitude estimations, an assumption further validated by recent data from a study in China (Xiao and Liu, 2007). ...
... nd cognitive distances. Although their database was rather sparse, they were able to propose an inverse relationship between emotional involvement with given cities and the distances towards them. More recent research taking into account a greater variety of distances again demonstrated attitudinal factors as the basis for biases in cognitive maps. Kerkman et al (2004) showed that`diversitythat`diversity orientation' (an attitudinal dimension defined as`positiveas`positive disposition toward other peoples and places') leads to a reduction of cognitive distances to distant cities in Mexico and Canada from a US-based center. Ekman and Bratfisch's paradigm was further employed by Carbon and Leder (2005) ...
... This effect was inverted for participants who liked US citizens. This interaction is quite important for further differentiating and identifying atittudinal factors distorting cognitive maps (Carbon, 2007; Carbon and Leder, 2005; Kerkman et al, 2004). The attitude towards the Iraq War can have a variety of sources and can be based on different rationales. ...
By the late Carboniferous period, the continents that today make up North America and Europe collided with the southern parts of Gondwana to form the western half of the last supercontinent Pangea. From this moment on, North America and Europe have steadily been drifting apart, as was initially described by Alfred Wegener in 1915. In this paper a cognitive counterpart of this continental drift is described—which progresses much faster than the phenomenon of plate tectonics. Distance estimations between cities of Europe and the USA were strongly modulated by an interactive effect of the social attitude towards the Iraq War in 2003 and towards US citizens in general, letting America and Europe drift apart hundreds of kilometers for those who disliked the war but were meanwhile sympathetic to US citizens. Possible implications for the relationship between Europe and the US are discussed and perspectives for a cognitive rapprochement of Europe and the USA are provided.
... Individuals tend to describe friends and in-group members as 'close' and strangers and out-group members as 'distant' 16 -a phenomenon so pervasive that it has even been observed in young children 17 . Physical distance is not only central to how individuals speak about others, it affects how people reason about and perceive physical distances between themselves and out-groups [18][19][20][21] . The tendency to equate out-groups with 'distant' manifests in non-verbal behaviours, most notably physical avoidance. ...
Here, using publicly available traffic camera feeds in combination with a real-world field experiment, we examine how pedestrians of different races behave in the presence of racial out-group members. Across two different New York City neighbourhoods and 3,552 pedestrians, we generate an unobtrusive, large-scale measure of inter-group racial avoidance by measuring the distance individuals maintain between themselves and other racial groups. We find that, on average, pedestrians in our sample (93% of whom were phenotypically non-Black) give a wider berth to Black confederates, as compared with white non-Hispanic confederates.
... Numerous studies showed that spatial representations are biased reflections of the environment (Tversky, 1993(Tversky, , 2003. People overestimate route distances with increasing intervening objects (Thorndyke, 1981), or they perceive distances differently depending on the objects' valence (Carbon & Hesslinger, 2013;Kerkman et al., 2004), implication for the self (Burris & Branscombe, 2005) or their status as a reference point (Sadalla et al., 1980). As both perceived influence and affective polarization of space depend on perceived distance, future research should integrate both traditions better. ...
This article reviews our experimental work about affective judgment in spatial context. This type of judgment serves to regulate one's distance toward people and things in physical space. The main idea is that orienting within physical space requires not only knowing where places are but also how places feel. This, in turn, depends on the influence of people and things contained in space on one's affective appraisal of the surroundings. Based on fundamental principles of social cognition, affective judgment in spatial context combines people's beliefs about how influence unfolds into the surroundings with comparison, categorization and information integration processes. Out comes a subjective affective representation of physical space that is cognitively coherent within a given spatial frame of reference. I review our work according to main topics and discuss four possible directions for future research.
... It can also influence how people reason about space. In one study, Americans with negative attitudes toward Mexicans estimated that Mexican cities were farther south than they actually are, and Americans with negative attitudes toward Canadians estimated that Canadian cities were farther north than they actually are (see Kerkman et al. 2004). ...
Inspired by the social representation theory, the article embraces many aspects of the way in which the space dimension in social distancing has become a central measure for both one’s own and others’ health protection during the Covid-19 pandemic, evoking symbolic dimensions related to the social representations of “others” that are emotionally driven by fear or mirror the vulnerable self, activating the othering–otherness process. This invisible (sometimes stigmatized) “other”—never previously known—has in a few months infected more than 11 million people on the global scale and caused more than 500 thousands deaths (as of 30 June 2020: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/). It has dictated where we can go, whether and how we can work, and whom we can meet, induced the virtualization of social relationships (“neighbours from afar” and “together but divided”), and confined working and socio-recreational activities to the home. The socio-spatial prescriptive distancing assumes various meanings in cultural contexts depending on whether lifestyles are more collectivist or individualistic and whether social practices are marked by crowded social proximity or distance. The social representations of cities as complex systems of “places” conceived for social “coexistence” have moved to prescriptive rules of inter-individual spaces (1 m, 2 m, and even more) for “survival”, with significant effects on place identity.
... Additional research has investigated whether subjective psychological feelings associated with crossed borders might also change distance estimates. Indeed, attitudes related to in-groups and out-groups have been shown to influence distance estimates in recent studies (Kerkman, Stea, Norris, & Rice, 2004;Burris & Branscombe, 2005). For instance, Burris and Branscombe (2005) asked university students from Memphis, Tennessee, and Lawrence, Kansas, to estimate distances between cities on a map of the United States. ...
Unlike social judgments, perceptual judgments are anchored in concrete reality and should not depend on social context. However, recent research suggests that perceptions of physical space can depend on social and emotional considerations. In contrast to theoretical approaches that view visual perception as a low-level process that is entirely independent of situational constraints, many studies support the notion that visual perception takes place in an "embodied" fashion, because people perceive the physical world around them as a function of how they would act in that world. This chapter reviews the influence of social and emotional factors in research involving maps and other conceptual representations of space, and in research involving the perception of distances and inclines. The reviewed findings provide a glimpse of how social factors influence basic cognitive processes previously assumed to be insulated from such influences.
... For example, an American sample was queried about their social attitudes toward other nationalities and their spatial estimates of the distance of different cities in those nations. Participants with negative attitudes toward Mexicans overestimated how far away south from America the cities were; similarly, those with negative attitudes toward Canadians overestimated how far north Canadian cities are (Kerkman et al., 2004). ...
Knowing who we are, and where we are, are two fundamental aspects of our physical and mental experience. Although the domains of spatial and social cognition are often studied independently, a few recent areas of scholarship have explored the interactions of place and self. This fits in with increasing evidence for embodied theories of cognition, where mental processes are grounded in action and perception. Who we are might be integrated with where we are, and impact how we move through space. Individuals vary in personality, navigational strategies, and numerous cognitive and social competencies. Here we review the relation between social and spatial spheres of existence in the realms of philosophical considerations, neural and psychological representations, and evolutionary context, and how we might use the built environment to suit who we are, or how it creates who we are. In particular we investigate how two spatial reference frames, egocentric and allocentric, might transcend into the social realm. We then speculate on how environments may interact with spatial cognition. Finally, we suggest how a framework encompassing spatial and social cognition might be taken in consideration by architects and urban planners.
... Thus, social factors constrain how people act and move in physical space, and this has consequences for how this space is perceived. Distances are perceived very differently depending on whether they imply entities that are considered part of one's in-group, or instead, an out-group (Kerkman, Stea, Norris, & Rice, 2004;Burris & Branscombe, 2005). For Basic Metaphors 8 instance, distances that involve crossing the borders between participants' home country (e.g., the U.S.) into a foreign country (e.g., Mexico) are estimated as greater than distances within the home country (Burris & Branscombe, 2005). ...
... Relying on the concept of social categorization, Maddox, Rapp, Brion, and Taylor (2008, Experiments 1-2) found that two small town business locations were estimated as closer when business owners were of the same race than when they were of a different race. Similarly, Kerkman, Stea, Norris, and Rice (2004) showed that ethnocentrism predicts biases in estimations of distances by American students, namely overestimation of the distance of Mexican cities from the United States. ...
Participants (N = 567) from six countries (Belgium, Ivory Coast, Italy, Kosovo, Portugal, and Switzerland) drew borders of their own and of neighbor countries on boundary-free maps. It was predicted and found that the tendency to overestimate versus underestimate the sizes of the countries, compared to the original maps, reflects the perceiver’s attitudes toward the target country, status asymmetries, and the quality of relations between the ingroup and outgroup countries. The findings are discussed with regard to the use of drawings in revealing people’s attitudes toward outgroups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
... For example, the southern United States and Mediterranean Europe are regions whose cities are both estimated to be too far south by approximately the same amount; it is possible to eliminate the bias in both regions by giving participants correct information about the latitude of a particular city or two—a " seed city " —in only one of them (see Friedman & Brown, 2000b). Additionally, category boundaries can be influenced by geopolitical beliefs about the regions (Carbon & Leder, 2005) or feelings about the people who live there (Kerkman et al., 2004 ). Thus, for geographical categories, inaccuracies in the long-term memory representations of the location of the category boundaries and, thus, their prototypes are often quite large. ...
Seven independent groups estimated the location of North American cities using both spatial and numeric response modes and a variety of perceptual and memory supports. These supports included having location markers for each city color coded by nation and identified by name, giving participants the opportunity to see and update all their estimates throughout the task, and allowing them to respond directly on a map. No manipulation mitigated the influence of categories on the judgments, but some manipulations improved within-region ordinal accuracy. The data provide evidence that the city and regional levels are independent, spatial and numeric response modalities affect accuracy differently at the different levels, biases at the regional level have multiple sources, and accurate spatial cues improve estimates primarily by limiting the use of global landmarks to partition the response space. Results support J. Huttenlocher, L. V. Hedges, and S. Duncan's (1991) theory of spatial location estimates and extend it to the domain of real-world geography.
... The overestimation between regions was amplified for participants who had a negative attitude toward the reunification of Germany, and these data are striking because the reunification of Germany occurred when most of the participants were young children. Thus, this study is a more convincing demonstration of the psychosocial factors that may contribute to the mental regionalization of global geography (see alsoKerkman, Stea, Norris, & Rice, 2004). That latitude, bearing, and distance judgments are generated from a common representation should not be surprising. ...
The authors examined whether absolute and relative judgments about global-scale locations and distances were generated from common representations. At the end of a 10-week class on the regional geography of the United States, participants estimated the latitudes of 16 North American cities and all possible pairwise distances between them. Although participants were relative experts, their latitude estimates revealed the presence of psychologically based regions with large gaps between them and a tendency to stretch North America southward toward the equator. The distance estimates revealed the same properties in the representation recovered via multidimensional scaling. Though the aggregated within- and between-regions distance estimates were fitted by Stevens's law (S. S. Stevens, 1957), this was an averaging artifact: The appropriateness of a power function to describe distance estimates depended on the regional membership of the cities. The authors conclude that plausible reasoning strategies, combined with regionalized representations and beliefs about the location of these relative to global landmarks, underlie global-scale latitude and distance judgments.
Marketers use augmented reality (AR) to place virtual brand‐related information into a consumer's physical context. Grounded in the literature on AR, brand love, metaphor theory, and closeness as interpreted by the neural theory of language, the authors theorize that branded AR content can reduce the perceived physical, spatial distance between a consumer and a brand. This perceived closeness subsequently drives the closeness of the emotional relationship in the form of brand love. Two empirical studies validate this framework. Study 1 shows that using an AR app (vs. non‐AR) increases the perceived physical closeness of the brand, which in turn drives brand love (i.e., relationship closeness). Study 2 replicates this finding in a pre‐/post‐use design. Here, high levels of local presence (i.e., the extent to which consumers perceive a brand as actually being present in their physical environment) drive perceived physical closeness, which leads to brand love. We also find that AR's power to generate brand love increases when the consumer is already familiar with the brand. We discuss managerial implications for AR marketing today and in a metaverse future in which AR content might be prevalent in consumers' everyday perceptions of the real world.
This study’s goal was to clarify how a city’s form and its internal sociospatial divisions affect cognitive representation of an urban environment. The study was based on an experiment in directional judgment in the city of Tel Aviv; it simultaneously provided conditions for cognitive distortions rooted in the orientation of a city’s form relative to the north–south (N-S) axis together with the socioeconomic and morphological differentiation between its northern and southern areas. Estimated directions within and between the city’s areas revealed systematic distortions related to (a) perceptual representation of the city’s form (i.e., rotation of the city‘s form) and (b) categorical representation stemming from the sociospatial division between the city’s internal areas. These findings provide evidence for the involvement of city form and sociospatial divisions in its cognitive representation. They also support arguments regarding the nonunitary nature of cognitive maps. The implications of the findings for urban planning are discussed.
Spatial relations of our environment are represented in cognitive maps. These cognitive maps are prone to various distortions (e.g., alignment and hierarchical effects) caused by basic cognitive factors (such as perceptual and conceptual reorganization) but also by affectively loaded and attitudinal influences. Here we show that even differences in attitude towards a single person repre-
senting a foreign country (here Barack Obama and the USA) can be related to drastic differences in the cognitive representation of distances concerning that country. Europeans who had a positive attitude towards Obama’s first presidential program estimated distances between US and European cities as being much smaller than did people who were skeptical or negative towards Obama's ideas. On the basis of this result and existing literature, arguments on the non-unitary and flexible nature of cognitive maps are discussed.
Why do people use spatial language to describe social relationships? In particular, to what extent do they anchor their thoughts about friendship in terms of space? Three experiments used drawing and estimation tasks to further explore the conceptual structure of social distance using friendship as a manipulation. In all three experiments, participants read short narratives and then drew what they imagined happened during the narrative and estimated passing time. Overall, the results of these exploratory studies suggest that the conceptual structure of friendship is linked to thought about space in terms of path drawing. Results are discussed in light of social distance and intercharacter interaction.
The Green Line constituted the armistice line between Israel and Jordan during the period 1949–1967. This paper discusses the familiarity of Israeli students with the nature and geographical location of the Green Line by restructuring and analyzing their mental maps. The findings of this study show that students who are men, long-term residents, identify themselves on the left end of the political spectrum, and professional geographers, show better knowledge concerning the issue of borders. However, most students revealed a certain vagueness and even ignorance concerning both spatial perception of the Green Line and its essence. The reasons for the revealed phenomenon are also discussed in this paper, as well as the behavioral implications of the familiarity with the Green Line, both in spatial and political contexts.
We examined alternate explanations for distortions in the subjective representation of North American geography. One explanation, based on physical proximity, predicts that bias in location estimates should increase with the distance from a participant's home city or region. An alternative is that biases arise from combining accurate and inaccurate beliefs about the cities and the superordinate regions to which they belong, including beliefs that may have social or cultural origins. To distinguish these, Canadians from Alberta and Americans from Texas judged the latitudes of cities in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The Texans' estimates of Mexican locations were 16" (approximately 1,120 miles) more biased than their estimates of Canadian locations that were actually about 840 miles farther away. This finding eliminates proximity as a primary source of geographic biases and underscores the role of categorical beliefs as an important source of biased judgments.
In line with social identity theory (SIT), minimal group paradigm (MGP) studies have shown that high in-group identifiers discriminate more than low in-group identifiers. But why do some people identify more to their ad hoc group in the MGP? One week prior to a MGP study, 121 undergraduates completed scales assessing their ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, and personal need for structure. In Phase 2, the same participants took part in a MGP study in which us-them categorization was either assigned randomly or was chosen. Participants who chose their group membership identified more with their own group and discriminated more than respondents randomly assigned to their group. Path analysis showed that ethnocentrism and perception of control over group ascription predicted degree of in-group identification, which in turn, was positively related to discriminatory behavior.
Reponses to 4 social distance scale items obtained in interviews with 50 members of each of 30 tribes in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania were analyzed for scalability and sources of variation. According to propositions derived from several sociopsychological theories of intergroup relations, social distance ratings of outgroups were predicted to vary with perceived similarity to the ingroup, physical distance from the ingroup, and educational-economic advancement of the outgroup. Social distance was expected to be closely related to ingroup members' liking for and familiarity with the outgroup. Guttman scale analyses of the social distance item responses revealed that the items were consistently highly scalable, with a high degree of commonality in the rank order of social distance steps across the 30 groups. Internal consistency of the 4 items and respondent reliability were also consistently high. Analysis of variance and correlational analyses of the effects of similarity, distance, and outgroup advancement, and their interactions, on social distance ratings produced highly consistent results. Social distance was found to vary most strongly with perceived similarity (the more similar the outgroup, the lower the social distance), next with distance (the nearer the outgroup, the lower the social distance), and, to some extent, with advancement (the more advanced the outgroup, the lower the social distance). There was also evidence of an interaction between similarity and advancement as a determinant of social distance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In 3 experiments, 56 college students were taught the names and locations of either real or artificial cities on the maps of 2 states. Then, they verified the truth of statements about the relative east–west locations of pairs of the cities. In Exp I with real cities, verification RTs decreased as the distance between the cities increased when the cities belonged to the same state; when they belonged to different states, RT was not affected by the distance between the cities. Bowed serial position curves also showed a sharp dip at the state boundary. Thus, categorization effects were observed. In Exp II–III, artificial materials were used in a similar task. When natural categories were grouped in the states, effects similar to those seen in Exp I occurred. When unrelated words were used as city names, categorization effects occurred only after practice. With practice, then, artificial categories came to function like natural categories. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Estimates of national population were studied in two experiments. In Experiment 1, Canadian and Chinese undergraduates rated their knowledge of 112 countries and then estimated the population of each. In Experiment 2, Canadians rated their knowledge of 52 countries and then provided population estimates for these primed countries and for a comparable set of 52 unprimed countries. In Experiment 1, participants from both nations produced estimates that resembled those obtained from Americans in prior studies (Brown and Siegler, 1992, 1993, 1996, 2001). However, there were several reliable cross-national differences in performance which appear to reflect cross-cultural differences in task-relevant naive domain knowledge. In addition, both experiments produced findings consistent with the claim that availability-based intuitions play an important role in this task. In Experiment 1, cross-national differences in rated knowledge predicted cross-national differences in estimated population; in Experiment 2, primed country names elicited larger population estimates than unprimed country names. We conclude by arguing for the general utility of this hybrid approach to real-world estimation. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Changes in new members' in-group and out-group stereotypes were examined, distinguishing among three stereotype components: stereotypicality, dispersion, and ethnocentrism. Pledges in 4 sororities judged their in-group and out-groups 4 times during their 8-month induction. Overall, out-groups were judged more stereotypically than in-groups at every wave. Although out-groups were initially perceived as more dispersed than in-groups, decreased out-group dispersion resulted in a shift toward out-group homogeneity. Ethnocentrism was present at every wave but decreased because of decreased in-group positivity. The authors discuss implications of these results for existing explanations of stereotype development. It is suggested that other aspects of group socialization (R.L. Moreland & J.M. Levine, 1982) are needed to explain fully the development of intergroup perceptions for new group members.
To understand the nature and etiology of biases in geographical judgments, the authors asked people to estimate latitudes (Experiments 1 and 2) and longitudes (Experiments 3 and 4) of cities throughout the Old and New Worlds. They also examined how people's biased geographical judgments change after they receive accurate information ("seeds") about actual locations. Location profiles constructed from the pre- and postseeding location estimates conveyed detailed information about the representations underlying geography knowledge, including the subjective positioning and subregionalization of regions within continents; differential seeding effects revealed between-region dependencies. The findings implicate an important role for conceptual knowledge and plausible-reasoning processes in tasks that use subjective geographical information.
We examined alternate explanations for distortions in the subjective representation of North American geography. One explanation, based on physical proximity, predicts that bias in location estimates should increase with the distance from a participant's home city or region. An alternative is that biases arise from combining accurate and inaccurate beliefs about the cities and the superordinate regions to which they belong, including beliefs that may have social or cultural origins. To distinguish these, Canadians from Alberta and Americans from Texas judged the latitudes of cities in Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. The Texans' estimates of Mexican locations were 16" (approximately 1,120 miles) more biased than their estimates of Canadian locations that were actually about 840 miles farther away. This finding eliminates proximity as a primary source of geographic biases and underscores the role of categorical beliefs as an important source of biased judgments.
The present study extends the sketch map technique to the global scale and is one of the few cognitive mapping studies which has explored images of the world. The major advantage of the sketch mapping method for this project is that it is easy to administer and it provides directly comparable products from countries of widely differing languages and cultures. The world image of Germany is of great interest now because of the astounding recent developments in Eastern Europe. So it will be used to illustrate the possibilities of our unique data set. Examination of 3568 student sketch maps of the world from 75 sites in 52 countries indicates that the image of Germany as a single country remains strong after nearly half this century as East and West Germany. The maps often only include the label Germany. Even among the countries in which many of the students are aware of East and West Germany, there are always some students who include the name Germany. All this evidence makes it apparent that the world image of Germany remains vivid decades after the division into East and West Germany. If the reunification proceeds as expected the match between image and reality will improve. -from Authors
On mental maps, at all scales, there is a tendency to exaggerate the size of the home area. To see whether there was a home continent exaggeration on sketch maps of the world, we used a subset of 438 maps from a world wide study of mental maps of the world. The subsample consisted of 20 maps from each of 22 sites, selected to include locations within each continent and dispersion latitudinally and longitudinally. On each map, the areas of the continent were calculated by means of a Numonics electronic planimeter attached to a computer. We compared the proportion of the total areas devoted to each continent to the actual proportions. Thus, we determined whether each continent tended to be exaggerated or diminished in size. The home continent was generally exaggerated. In addition, two unforeseen results were that Europe is always exaggerated, and Africa always diminished in size.
This paper develops a technique for isolating and studying the per- ceptual structures that chess players perceive. Three chess players of varying strength - from master to novice - were confronted with two tasks: ( 1) A perception task, where the player reproduces a chess position in plain view, and (2) de Groot's ( 1965) short-term recall task, where the player reproduces a chess position after viewing it for 5 sec. The successive glances at the position in the perceptual task and long pauses in tbe memory task were used to segment the structures in the reconstruction protocol. The size and nature of these structures were then analyzed as a function of chess skill. What does an experienced chess player "see" when he looks at a chess position? By analyzing an expert player's eye movements, it has been shown that, among other things, he is looking at how pieces attack and defend each other (Simon & Barenfeld, 1969). But we know from other considerations that he is seeing much more. Our work is concerned with just what ahe expert chess pIayer perceives.
Sketch maps of the world drawn by Brazilian university students were coded for frequency of inclusion of nations. The relationship between inclusion, as an indicator of world knowledge, and physical/social characteristics of individual countries was examined using correlation and multiple regression analyses. Predictive variables included map features, economic development, geopolitical importance, and others. A split-sample strategy allowed for an exploratory regression analysis followed by a cross-validation phase, which generated a final model that accounted for 76 per cent of the variance of the dependent variable. The main influences upon the inclusion of nations on the sketch maps were exerted by world indicators of geo-political and military power, size of the country and economic importance, followed by less powerful determinants based on cultural similarities and location of the country on a world map. Sample specifics are presented and implications for the cumulative understanding of world knowledge are discussed within the conceptual framework of cognitive maps of all scales.
A set of 3863 sketch maps of the world drawn by students from 71 sites in 49 countries was analyzed to see how the maps were centered. The set revealed three main types of centering: Eurocentric, Sinocentric, and Americentric. By far the most common were Eurocentric maps, reflecting conventional world maps centered on the Greenwich Meridian. The main deviations from the Eurocentric mode can be explained by longitude - students from countries that would be on the edge of a Eurocentric map selected another type. -from Author
In constructing this social distance scale, 60 single sentence descriptions heard in ordinary conversations and representing different types of social relationship were rated according to the amount of social distance each possessed. By means of judgments from 100 faculty members and graduate students it was possible to obtain a series of 7 situations with an equidistant mean rating. In administering this test composed of the 7 situations, each subject is given a list of 40 races, 30 occupations, and 30 religions with detailed instructions for rating. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Allport (1954) recognized that attachment to one's ingroups does not necessarily require hostility toward outgroups. Yet the prevailing approach to the study of ethnocentrism, ingroup bias, and prejudice presumes that ingroup love and outgroup hate are reciprocally related. Findings from both cross-cultural research and laboratory experiments support the alternative view that ingroup identification is independent of negative attitudes toward outgroups and that much ingroup bias and intergroup discrimination is motivated by preferential treatment of ingroup members rather than direct hostility toward outgroup members. Thus to understand the roots of prejudice and discrimination requires first of all a better understanding of the functions that ingroup formation and identification serve for human beings. This article reviews research and theory on the motivations for maintenance of ingroup boundaries and the implications of ingroup boundary protection for intergroup relations, conflict, and conflict prevention.
This paper discusses world patterns of geographic literacy and illiteracy based on the quality of sketch maps of the world drawn by university students in first-year geography classes. The study, sponsored by the International Geographical Union and funded by the National Geographic Society, contains 3,568 sketch maps of the world collected from 75 sites in 52 countries. For the purposes of this paper, geographic literacy is equated with the number of nations and continents included on the sketch maps. The individual map scores are aggregated to determine the average number of items per map for each site and nation. Our set of maps provides a baseline of world variations in geographic literacy just prior to the end of the Cold War. The sketch map techniques can be used to monitor changes in geographic literacy.
Differential views of the world: Shared and parochial world images. Paper presented at the 17th Conference of the International Association for People-Environment Studies (IAPS
- J Q Pinheiro
- T F Saarinen
- C L Maccabe
Pinheiro, J. Q., T. F. Saarinen, and C. L. MacCabe. 2002. Differential views of the world: Shared and parochial world images. Paper presented at the 17th Conference of the International Association for People-Environment Studies (IAPS 2002).
Assessing and improving geographical beliefs: A cognitive approach
- N R Brown
- A Friedman
The map-image of Africa as seen by Africans and non-Africans. Paper presented at the International Geographical Union's Commission on Geographical Education Symposium
- C S Berkowitz
- T F Saarinen
- C L Maccabe
The measurement of mental maps: An experimental model for studying conceptual spaces
- D Stea
- K R Know
- R G Golledge