Canadian students mistaken about the Hiroshima bombing matched their belief in the Holocaust

Evidence

Lest we just single out American youth, in the fall of 1995 I asked 184 Manitoba introductory psychology students to say (on a ~4 to +4 basis, converted to the usual 1-9 format) how false or true various statements were. The mean of answers to “The United States dropped atom bombs on Japan at the end of World War I” was 7.49. This happened about eight weeks after numerous television programs aired marking the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The figure of 7.49 matches students’ belief in the Holocaust, and was mainly due to students who said they did not know, one way or the other. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 4342

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Milgram-displacement and epistemic-competence failures discussed elsewhere in the book, and to the general literature on student historical ignorance.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ pairing in reverse: here a genuinely shocking historical fact (Hiroshima/Nagasaki) competes with routine ignorance, showing knowledge gaps persist even right after major anniversary coverage.
• QUESTION: Why did the 50th-anniversary programming fail to register? Wondering whether the students misread the date as a trick question regardless of actual knowledge.