Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Prepare for your exams
Study with the several resources on Docsity
Earn points to download
Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan
Community
Ask the community for help and clear up your study doubts
Discover the best universities in your country according to Docsity users
Free resources
Download our free guides on studying techniques, anxiety management strategies, and thesis advice from Docsity tutors
This article by scott berinato explores the persuasive power of charts and graphs in data visualization. The author discusses recent research that challenges the assumption that charts are universally more persuasive than other forms of communication. The article highlights the importance of the reader's attitude, cognitive state, and execution in the effectiveness of data visualization.
What you will learn
Typology: Study Guides, Projects, Research
1 / 9
This page cannot be seen from the preview
Don't miss anything!
NICHOLAS BLECHMAN FOR HBR
“ I’ll believe it when I see it, ” is a hackneyed idiom, but it sticks because it happens to be mostly true.
It’s one of the reasons why data visualization is emerging as a powerful information force in the crowded, intensely
COPYRIGHT © 2015 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 2
message being conveyed, visuals persuaded effectively. But they were less effective when participants held strong opinions in opposition to the message being conveyed.
COPYRIGHT © 2015 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 3
This makes sense. It takes more to convince someone who doesn’t believe you than someone who simply doesn’t know or doesn’t care. But there’s more. Those with stronger opposing views were more likely to be swayed when a disagreeable message was presented in the form of a table. Even now, good old-fashioned rows and columns sometimes outperform charts.
The authors caution that this finding needs further validation, but it’s a tantalizing idea worthy of further exploration. Pandey’s work suggests that the assumption that charts are more persuasive than other forms of communication may not always be true.
Charts may even backfire. An unrelated study led by Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth focused on political beliefs and
misperceptions tended to reject factual corrections no matter what. The researchers speculate that that’s because the facts presented (about hot-button topics like climate change) felt threatening to their world-view and their identity. In other words, a chart may cause someone with a polar opposite view to dig in their heels because it’s too psychologically painful to confront compelling evidence that conflicts with their beliefs.
The researchers did find another method besides charts for winning over these people though: affirmation. Asking them to recall a time when they felt good about themselves made them more willing to acknowledge uncomfortable facts.
of the most interesting new research on visualization) has shown that the persuasive power of a visual–and even our ability to understand one–isn’t a fixed thing. The effectiveness of visualization changes with mood, gender, personality
and what they take away from it.
Harrison and his team found that positive priming improved people’s ability to analyze charts. A well-understood chart will naturally be more persuasive than a poorly understood one. While charts tossed into the wild — on Twitter and in news stories, for example — can’t really control for the mood of the reader, others can. Harrison likes to point to a clinical setting in which a doctor has the delicate task of explaining mortality risks to patients recently diagnosed with a disease. Clearly each patient has been negatively primed (“the test came back positive”) and that will affect their ability to understand information given to them, perhaps in chart form, about the risks they face and the chances that the result is valid. Knowing that these patients are in a negative frame of mind and their ability to comprehend charts and make wise decisions is likely impaired as a result, doctors may be able to find better ways of delivering the message.
The less fraught, more common example is the standard business presentation. A bored, agitated, tired, audience won’t make sense of your charts and the message you want to convey as well as one that’s engaged, happy (maybe well-fed), and generally positively primed.
Execution matters. It also appears that the ability for people to get information from a chart affects their judgment of the data itself. That is, credibility suffers if the visual is difficult to make sense of. The most anti-persuasive thing you can do is to make a bad chart that frustrates people.
What are the ways charts cause us to look away? Complexity is one. If there’s too much information and no clear, salient point that we can intuit, we tend to shut down, unless we have the time, space, and inclination to work hard at finding the narrative in the visual. Certainly in a presentation setting, that’s unlikely.
Another way charts go off the rails is if there are too many salient points fighting for our attention. This is often the result of poor design. When trying to make a persuasive chart, keep in mind the design aphorism, “if everything is bold, nothing is.”
Finally, people tend to struggle with charts that flout convention — if you depict time going right-to-left, say, or put scale categories out of order (e.g. imagine a chart that lists values for answers in this order: Very Likely, Not at all likely , Somewhat Unlikely, Somewhat Likely .) Anytime people’s expectations are messed with, it requires some cognitive gymnastics to rearrange the information in a way that they’re used to seeing it. If it’s too much of an effort, they’ll give up.
Because the tools to create visualizations have become relatively cheap and easy to use, visual communication is exploding. One of the assumptions behind this new era of dataviz is that charts and graphs provide a necessary, compelling, and better way to persuade people. Indeed, in highly charged debates littered with polarized attitudes, our impulse is to just throw more and more charts at each other. “X Charts that Explain Y Topic” articles are legion, and demonstrate just how deeply ingrained the idea has become that if we make it a chart, people will be persuaded it’s true.
Usually, but not always. You may want to remind them that they’re good people, too.
Harvard Business Review Press and available for pre-order now.
