I would expect it to be a lot higher too. Bitcoin has very few companies promoting it and they aren't big enough to afford prime time advertizing. The Bitcoin bowl was amazing but only reached a small segment of a regional population. I'm not even sure nethanderthal sports enthusiasts are really Bitcoin's target audience anyway. One big plus to large corporate proprietary inventions is the ability to advertise. Open source public projects need lots of time to spread via word of mouth and the occasional news story. If most of the news stories that do surface are a negative turnoff then you will need even more time for it to spread because now you need to defeat that negativity.

How often do you see someone with a dollar bill on their shirt? I'd be more baffled if he had  "buy government bonds, support your country!" written there.  

Not very often, but dollar shirts certainly do exist: http://www.cafepress.com/+dollar-bill+t-shirts

I wouldn't trust this kind of 'research'. In my opinion any data collected by asking 1000 people about something is borderline useless and can't be used as proof that Americans are not educated about bitcoin or anything really. It is just pure luck and randomness. Plus - this kind of social survey can be read in different ways - to prove different things really.

Bitcoin has been in the news and the all time high had done some buzzing around.  So a lot of people have heard of it and seen the logo on tv when it was news worthy. At work, all my collegues knew about bitcoin without me telling them about it. So there is a lot of awareness, but not to many people actively support and use bitcoin. Most of them will not know anymore about bitcoin than that it is 'a ponzi scheme and internet money' not real in their eyes.

I dont know where you live but I conducted a small survey here and not a single person know what even bitcoin was.

and northpole habitants ;p