"Political distance can make cities in your home country seem more geographically distant."

"Psychologist Claus-Christian Carbon, of the University of Vienna, asked Germans to estimate the distance between several German cities. They found, even 15 years after German reunification, that people tended to overestimate the distance between cities that were on opposite sides of the former East-West German border. (The subjects also overestimated the distance between cities on the same side of the border, but the overestimation was greater for pairs on opposite sides.) Their home was split, and then reunified, but the attitudes and prejudices remained."

"Further analysis revealed that these social attitudes were better predictors of distance estimations than geographical knowledge, and their bias was not affected by travel experience. Perhaps the most striking finding of these studies was that the more people were politically opposed to reunification, the larger their overestimation—the political distance translated into a geographical distance in their minds. In one typical case, the actual distance between Düsseldorf and Leipzig is 391 kilometers (243 miles), but people with a negative attitude toward unification guessed this distance to be 526 km (327 mi), and the people who felt positively toward the unification guessed, on average, 429 km (267 mi). The symbolic Iron Curtain had a perceptual size—and it was over 100 km (62 mi) wider for people opposed to unification... "

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