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Farhad offers:
Remember, people in the survey were trying to place countries on unlabeled maps.
So what!? Unlabeled maps have been part of every single TV news broadcast that has ever been put to air. I can invoke the visual for you with this simple auditory clue:
"And now to Susan with the weather...." And there she is standing in front of a huge unlabelled map.
For global unlabelled maps, see the "world weather" on CNN or the BBC.
But fortunately there's a much simpler and indeed far more rational reason why people all over the world get maps wrong. You can sum this reason up with one word:
Scale.
Maps are massively, vastly scaled. Similar to the a sizable majority of people who simply cannot "see" a 3D room from a 2D plan, a sizable minority of people simply cannot connect a map to anything real that they experience in the world.
The scale is simply too vast.
The skill of understanding maps can be taught even to those who don't naturally "get" it, but only if, like any other skill, someone wants to learn.
