Americans who don’t know where Ukraine is are more likely to support military intervention – poll

RT
April 8, 2014

Those Americans who struggle to correctly point out even the continent Ukraine is located on are more likely to support US military intervention to resolve the crisis and the advancement of US national security interests, a new survey has revealed.

Image: Ukraine Flags (Wiki Commons).

A newly published poll, conducted by three Ivy League professors, revealed that only one out of six Americans surveyed could pinpoint where Ukraine actually is on a world map. The survey also showed a worrying correlation in answers – the further the person thought Ukraine is from its actual geographical location, the more likely he or she was to support military intervention in a sovereign state.

In their study, conducted between March 28-31, Kyle Dropp of Dartmouth College, Joshua D. Kertzer of Harvard University, and Thomas Zeitzoff of Princeton asked 2,066 Americans where Ukraine was on a map and how they think Washington should respond to the crisis there.

The survey was conducted to “see where Americans think Ukraine is and to learn if this knowledge (or lack thereof) is related to their foreign policy views,” the authors explained in a Washington Post blog.

The results, combined in a heat map representing where respondents thought Ukraine was, show that only 16 percent of Americans correctly identified Ukraine on a map, with the median respondent being about 1,800 miles off. Some people thought Ukraine could be located as far south as Argentina or Australia, or as north as Finland.

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