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This spring, the Pew Research Center talked with people in 44 countries around the world to find out what they see as the world's biggest danger. After surveying more than 48,000 people, the group found that people gave very different answers depending on where they live.

Pew's research, published on Oct. 16, showed that what Americans see as the biggest threat to the world -- the gap between rich and poor, according to a plurality (27 percent) of U.S. respondents -- is far different from what people in Japan say it is: nuclear weapons.

After inequality, Americans identified religious and ethnic hatred (24 percent), nuclear weapons (23 percent), and pollution and environmental hazards (15 percent), while 7 percent said AIDS and other infectious diseases were the world's biggest dangers.

Image credit: Pew Research Global Attitudes Project

(Note that the survey was taken between March 17 and June 5, months before two American aid workers in west Africa contracted the Ebola virus and were later successfully treated with experimental drugs, triggering a wave of news stories that have since made "Ebola" a household word in the U.S.)

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In Africa, however, respondents said infectious diseases topped the list of their biggest concerns (29 percent), while people in the Middle East identified religious and ethnic hatred as their biggest threat by a large margin -- 34 percent, vs. the 20 percent who named nuclear weapons as the biggest danger.

Europeans, like their counterparts in the U.S., said inequality was the world's biggest threat, which reveals the degree to which people on the continent have continued to struggle with the after-effects of the 2008 global economic slowdown, Pew noted.

"People in Spain and Greece, among the hardest hit by the Eurocrisis, are especially worried," Pew pointed out. "In fact, worries about inequality have doubled in Spain since 2007, as well as in Italy, another economically damaged southern European country."

In Japan -- the only country where nuclear weapons have been used in war, Pew notes -- almost half the public said they are the world's gravest threat. But younger generations are less worried than older ones with still-vivid memories of the 1945 bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pew adds.

See how every country in the survey responded below, or read the full report at the Pew Research Center.