Can Data Visualizations Change Minds? Identifying Mechanisms of Elaborative Thinking and Persuasion

Abstract

Recent years have seen rapid growth in data-driven communication and the public availability of datasets on a broad set of social issues. Yet despite this unprecedented accessibility, the public often remains divided along partisan or ideological lines and to lack a common understanding of the issues at stake. In this paper we consider the role of data visualizations in communicating scientific evidence, and in particular, their power to persuade in the face of conflicting prior beliefs and attitudes. We describe a recent study showing that strong attitudes about politically polarized topics were associated with less belief change when interacting with statistical data visualizations. Moreover, there was little evidence for attitude change even when people updated their beliefs about specific empirical relationships. We then draw on research in cognitive science to identify elements of visualizations that may produce such attitude change because they encourage elaborative thinking when interacting with data. We argue for further research that considers how broader attitudes-which are tied to social identity, values, and worldviews-affect the power of data visualizations to persuade among communities with diverse ideological and cultural backgrounds.