‘Alterpodes: Communication biases in plausible reasoning about geographic perception of place and space’

This study builds on exis ng work on cartographic thinking in everyday life to be er understand how digital and/or traditional media influence our perceptions of con nental scale geography. Using a mixed, US-Italian sample of college students living in ci es on similar la tudes, we found that there is a bias in placing U.S. ci es further north and European ci es further south than where they should be. Such biases re ect a process of ‘plausible reasoning,’ which assumes that places are located cartographically in a biased way due to cultural-cogni ve processes facilitated by media. The speci c media found to be related with such biases in this study and direc ons for future research are discussed. This study examines how “plausible reasoning” facilitated by media connec ons contributes to geographic mispercep ons. We explore the possibility that people infer geographic alignment of global ci es especially on la tude from percep on of cultural similari es between the people who inhabit them. A core ques on it inves gates, building on exis ng literature on cartographic reasoning and know- ledge (Friedman and Brown, 2000a, 200b), is that cultural and social heuris cs may be shaped by social learning and interac on channels, such as those mediated by social media and by knowledge/media resources more broadly. It is our conten on that in addi on to basic categorical judgment mistakes, induced by basic mapping informa on errors, we can also detect some errors and correc ons induced by social and mediated experiences. From a broader perspec ve, our study aims to address the ques on if easier access to media, especially more sophis cate channels and source of digital informa on (social media, maps, social networking) alleviates or not geographic mispercep ons. In a word, does access to social media make us sense of geographic be er and how does such access interact with our cultural biases?