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Difficulties with and in Geography
Faculty members at America’s colleges and universities routinely lament what they regard as their undergraduate students’ woeful lack of geographical knowledge. It appears that failing to ensure that school children spend some time looking over and studying maps, let alone acquiring more sophisticated geographical knowledge, is yet another way in which primary and secondary education in America has been falling short over the past couple of decades.
Simply looking at maps, however, is not enough, as distortions are inherent to maps. That is true because the earth has a curved surface and maps are flat. To project a curved surface onto a flat one requires introducing distortions pertaining to either distance, direction, shape, or area. Try, for example, to use a sheet of paper to cover the surface of a basketball faithfully without deforming the sheet of paper. Note, that you can deform the paper in lots of different ways in order to cover the basketball’s surface. Every flat map includes some of these distortions.
Undoubtedly, those inherent distortions sometimes influence how we see and recall maps, especially if most of the maps we see involve the same sort of projection. Distortions in familiar maps, i.e., maps that use the most popular projections, which we see over and over again, can produce some startling misimpressions about the earth’s geography.
For example, although Greenland is the world’s largest island, contrary to the widespread assumptions about its size spawned by the popularity of Mercator projection world maps, it is, in fact, only one fourteenth the size of Africa. The further from the equator some region is, the greater the area Mercator projections attribute to it. Since all of Greenland is north of 60 degrees north latitude, whereas the equator runs through the middle of Africa, a Mercator projection map portrays the former as substantially larger than it is, relative to equatorial regions, such as Africa.
Four Questions: A Second Source of Distortions?
I have long suspected that a second set of considerations leads to errors in geographical understanding and in memory for maps. I have found that typical responses to the following questions exhibit some of the tell-tale signs of cognitive bias in how people see and remember what most Americans with any geographical knowledge regard as familiar maps (of the U.S.A. and of the Western Hemisphere). It is such unconscious distortions that seep into people’s memories for those maps that suggest that perceptual or mnemonic biases may be in play.
Now to the questions. Without looking at a map, answer each of the following questions from memory regarding the relevant maps (correct answers are at the end of this post; do not peek!):
For a map of the 48 contiguous states of the U.S.A.:
1. What direction must you fly in to get from Los Angeles, California to Reno, Nevada?
2. What major city is nearly due north of Atlanta, Georgia?
For a map of the Western Hemisphere
3. What city in the east is at the same latitude as Portland, Oregon?
4. What South American capital is due south of Cleveland, Ohio?
Mapping Distortions and Cognitive Distortions of Memories for Maps Are Not the Same Things
To be clear, the distortions that are intrinsic to mapping are not examples of the cognitive distortions of memory that the questions in the previous section aim to tap. Nor, crucially, are they likely to explain all of the memory distortions that people often demonstrate. (That is certainly true, for example, with respect to question 4 above.)
Cognitive distortions are a function of how our minds work. They arise because of cognitive penchants to see and remember parts of the world (in this case, maps) in particular ways. Since the 1970s nearly all philosophers of science have stressed the influence of theory on perception, arguing that all perception is theory-impregnated. As I have argued in an earlier post, how easy it is to recognize such influences depends on conscious reflective understanding of the conceptual frameworks in question. That is a serious problem with memory for maps, though, since it is not obvious what assumptions influence how we see and recall them.
The Answers, Please
The answers to the questions follow. 1. You must fly nearly due north (but slightly north northwest) to get from Los Angeles to Reno. 2. Detroit is almost due north of Atlanta (though Atlanta is slightly further west). 3. Montreal is at the same latitude as Portland. 4. This is something of a trick question. All of continental South America is east of Cleveland.
