FOR RELEASE MAY 25, 2022 What Do Americans Know About International Affairs? Liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans more knowledgeable than others BY Laura Silver, Christine Huang, Laura Clancy, Aidan Connaughton and Sneha Gubbala FOR MEDIA OR OTHER INQUIRIES: Laura Silver, Senior Researcher Hannah Klein, Communications Manager 202.419.4372 www.pewresearch.org RECOMMENDED CITATION Pew Research Center, May 2022, “What Do Americans Know About International Affairs?” 1 PEW RESEARCH CENTER www.pewresearch.org About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It does not take policy positions. The Center conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, computational social science research and other data-driven research. It studies politics and policy; news habits and media; the internet and technology; religion; race and ethnicity; international affairs; social, demographic and economic trends; science; research methodology and data science; and immigration and migration. Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. © Pew Research Center 2022 2 PEW RESEARCH CENTER www.pewresearch.org How we did this Pew Research Center conducted this study to explore what Americans know about international affairs, how this varies across groups in society and how international knowledge is related to attitudes about foreign countries, foreign leaders and more. The measure of international knowledge that we developed is based on 12 questions and covers facts about global leaders, international institutions and geography, among other topics. For more on this measure, see Appendix A or “How we designed a scale to measure Americans’ knowledge of international affairs.” For this analysis, we surveyed 3,581 U.S. adults from March 21 to 27, 2022. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology. Here are the questions used for the report, along with responses and its methodology. 3 PEW RESEARCH CENTER www.pewresearch.org What Do Americans Know About International Affairs? Liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans more knowledgeable than others Before you read the report Test your international knowledge by taking the interactive quiz. The short quiz tests your knowledge of questions recently asked in a national poll. After completing the quiz, you can compare your score with the general public and with people like yourself. Take the quiz Americans know a great deal about certain global leaders and institutions. For example, nearly eight-in-ten U.S. adults can look at a photo of Kim Jong Un and correctly identify him as the leader of North Korea, and nearly two-thirds know that Boris Johnson is the current prime minister of the United Kingdom. A slim majority also know that Ukraine is not a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). However, as a new Pew Research Center survey shows, Americans are less familiar with other topics. Despite the U.S. government labeling the events in Xinjiang, China, as genocide, only around one-in-five Americans are aware that it is the region in China with the most Muslims per capita. And only 41% can identify the flag of the second most populous country in the world, India. 4 PEW RESEARCH CENTER www.pewresearch.org Americans’ international knowledge varies a great deal depending on the question Note: Correct answers are highlighted and in bold. The order of the substantive responses were randomized and “not sure” appeared at the bottom of each option set. All questions are multiple choice; for full question wording, see topline. Source: Survey of U.S. adults conducted March 21-27, 2022. Q64-75. “What Do Americans Know About International Affairs?” PEW RESEARCH CENTER 5 PEW RESEARCH CENTER www.pewresearch.org On average, Americans give more correct than incorrect answers to the 12 questions in the study. The mean number of correct answers is 6.3, while the median is 7. But the survey finds that levels of international knowledge vary based on who is answering. Americans with more education tend to score higher, for example, than those with less formal education. Men also tend to get more questions correct than women. Older Americans and those who are more interested in foreign policy also tend to perform better. Political party groups are roughly similar in their overall levels of international knowledge, although conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats tend to score higher on the scale than do their mor