Americans who can't place Ukraine more likely to favor intervention

WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) -- Only 16 percent of Americans can place Ukraine on a map and the ones who couldn't were more likely to want the U.S. to intervene.

The poll, created by political scientists Kyle Dropp of Dartmouth College, Joshua D. Kertzer of Harvard University and Thomas Zeitzoff of Princeton University, and published in the Washington Post states that only 1 of 6 Americans could accurately locate Ukraine on the map. The scientists took a sample of 2,066 Americans and asked them to pin Ukraine on a high-resolution map.

There were pins on every continent except Antarctica -- which wasn't included -- and some in the Indian, Pacific, and Arctic oceans, and the North Sea. The researchers found that those who less accurately pinned Ukraine's location were more likely to favor U.S. military intervention.

"The further our respondents thought that Ukraine was from its actual location, the more they wanted the U.S. to intervene militarily," the scientists wrote in the Washington Post. "Even controlling for a series of demographic characteristics and participants’ general foreign policy attitudes, we found that the less accurate our participants were, the more they wanted the U.S. to use force, the greater the threat they saw Russia as posing to U.S. interests, and the more they thought that using force would advance U.S. national security interests."

Some Americans seem to think the Ukraine is in the middle of the United States, one of many factors that led the researchers to call the results "disconcerting."

[HuffPost Live] [Washington Post]