Same Data, Diverging Perspectives: The Power of Visualizations to Elicit Competing Interpretations

People routinely rely on data to make decisions, but the process can be riddled with biases. We show that patterns in data might be noticed first or more strongly, depending on how the data is visually represented or what the viewer finds salient. We also demonstrate that viewer interpretation of da...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 2024-06, Vol.30 (6), p.2995-3007
Main Authors: Bearfield, Cindy Xiong, van Weelden, Lisanne, Waytz, Adam, Franconeri, Steven
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affordances
Annotations
bar chart
Bars
Data mining
Data visualization
Decisions
Image color analysis
line chart
Momentum
predictions
Salience
table
Visual perception
visual saliency
Visualization
visualization design
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Summary:People routinely rely on data to make decisions, but the process can be riddled with biases. We show that patterns in data might be noticed first or more strongly, depending on how the data is visually represented or what the viewer finds salient. We also demonstrate that viewer interpretation of data is similar to that of 'ambiguous figures' such that two people looking at the same data can come to different decisions. In our studies, participants read visualizations depicting competitions between two entities, where one has a historical lead (A) but the other has been gaining momentum (B) and predicted a winner, across two chart types and three annotation approaches. They either saw the historical lead as salient and predicted that A would win, or saw the increasing momentum as salient and predicted B to win. These results suggest that decisions can be influenced by both how data are presented and what patterns people find visually salient.
ISSN:1077-2626
1941-0506
1941-0506
DOI:10.1109/TVCG.2024.3388515