Sociopolitical influences on geographical judgments of locations and distances by Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots living in Cyprus

Many non-geographic factors influence spatial judgments of real-world locations, which implies that spatial representations are not metrically veridical. We investigated the influence of social and ethnic factors on geographical judgments in the geopolitical context of Cyprus – an island divided since 1974 into the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities in the north and south, respectively. Participants from each community (249 Greek Cypriots, 322 Turkish Cypriots) indicated their familiarity with 19 towns (town knowledge task), and estimated the locations of those towns (location estimation task) and the straight-line distance between them (distance estimation task). In questionnaires, they also rated their attitudes toward the other community. Cypriots underestimated distances and contracted the relative locations of towns within the other community more so than within their own community. Moreover, Cypriots who were more willing to live together with Cypriots from the other community (i.e., perceiving less social distance) underestimated distances between towns, whereas those less willing to live together overestimated distances. The results support the notion that representations of global-scale environments have multi-faceted origins, which include social factors (e.g., ethnic identity, political attitudes) that are not usually associated with spatial representations.