Hans Rosling has a good TED talk discussing this in the context of the mind set people have concerning industrial and developing nations, http://blog.ted.com/20

Hans Rosling has a good TED talk discussing this in the context of the mind set people have concerning industrial and developing nations, http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/let_my_dataset.php http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/let_my_dataset.php. He claims most peoples opinions are from data available in 50's through 70's which corresponds to the dates when their school teachers were in college.