Study Shows Election Data Visualization Design Can Be a Powerful Persuasion Tool

From election forecasts and pandemic dashboards to stock market charts and scientific figures, many people trust data visualizations as objective truths and neutral representations of reality.

However, a study led by Georgia Tech and University of California, Berkeley researchers shows that annotations can lead people to draw different conclusions from the same visualizations. Their findings suggest readers should look beyond the presented data to make informed decisions.

“People question things less if they see something that’s visualized, and they think this is a reliable, trustworthy source they can use to form an opinion or persuade others,” said Cindy Xiong, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing. “People don’t realize the persuasive power of visualization, and they’re not as vigilant to critically think about the data they interact with.”

For example, people tend to trust the information in an election data visualization. That makes them susceptible to narratives that visualization designers may use to obtain a certain outcome.