Spatial location judgments: a cross-national comparison of estimation bias in subjective North American geography

Abstract

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.