Why Can't We Have Nice Things?

A guide to social dataviz and democracy, for Dartmouth's Data in Action symposium.

Thank you for the opportunity to share. See materials below for reference.

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Talk Notes

Abstract

Wokeness is a problem in the United States. Specifically, Americans aren’t nearly woke enough, and this lack of wokeness could be our undoing. Social misbeliefs aren’t just dangerous for the people being misunderstood, they put everyone at risk, undermining health, education, economic progress, and democracy itself. In this context, woke dataviz isn’t just about ethics or efficacy: it’s a matter of self-preservation.

In this talk, we’ll explore the surprising interplay between data design and social cognition. We’ll consider how visual rhetoric influences perceptions, how those perceptions support broader social narratives, and how those narratives, in turn, shape our reality.

Misunderstanding

We see what we want to see.

We read ambiguous signals through the lenses of our prior beliefs.

Brigham 1923
A Study of American Intelligence

Gould 1981
The Mismeasure of Man

Xiong Bearfield et al 2022
Seeing What You Believe or Believing What You See? Belief Biases Correlation Estimation

Luo & Zhao 2019
Motivated Attention in Climate Change Perception and Action

Baekgaard et al 2017
The Role of Evidence in Politics: Motivated Reasoning and Persuasion among Politicians

Xiong Bearfield et al 2023
Same Data, Diverging Perspectives: The Power of Visualizations to Elicit Competing Interpretations

Xiong et al 2019
Illusion of Causality in Visualized Data

Wang et al 2024
Causal Priors and Their Influence on Judgements of Causality in Visualized Data

Matute et al 2015
Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced

Speak for the data.

Good dataviz is good writing.

Wall & Xiong 2025
Confirmation Bias: The Double-Edged Sword of Data Facts in Visual Data Communication

Kong et al 2019
Trust and Recall of Information across Varying Degrees of Title-Visualization Misalignment

D'Ignazio & Klein 2020
Data Feminism

Krug 2000
Don't Make Me Think. A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

Horne et al 2019
Explanation as a Cognitive Process

Matute et al 2015
Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced

Vadillo et al. 2013
Fighting the Illusion of Control: How to Make Use of Cue Competition and Alternative Explanations

Complacency

Inequality is assumed to be moral.

Legitimizing myths support the status quo through complacency.

Brosnan & de Waal 2003
Monkeys reject unequal pay

Weber 1905
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Quist & Resendez 2002
Social Dominance Threat: Examining Social Dominance Theory's Explanation of Prejudice as Legitimizing Myths

Heiserman et al 2020
Heiserman et al 2020 Judgments of Economic Fairness Are Based More on Perceived Economic Mobility Than Perceived Inequality

Jhangiani & Tarry 2022
Other Determinants of Helping

Holder & Xiong 2022
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Holder & Padilla 2024
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Skinner-Dorkenoo et al. 2022
Highlighting COVID-19 racial disparities can reduce support for safety precautions among White U.S. residents

Engel et al 2022
Policies to influence perceptions about COVID-19 risk: The case of maps

Hook & Markus 2020
Health in the United States: Are Appeals to Choice and Personal Responsibility Making Americans Sick?

Piff et al 2020
Shifting attributions for poverty motivates opposition to inequality and enhances egalitarianism

Blame Systems, Not People

Use data to educate about social determinants of health, wealth and education.

Heiserman et al 2020
Heiserman et al 2020 Judgments of Economic Fairness Are Based More on Perceived Economic Mobility Than Perceived Inequality

Holder & Padilla 2024
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Piff et al 2020
Shifting attributions for poverty motivates opposition to inequality and enhances egalitarianism

Stereotypes

Social support is shaped by stereotypes about the groups in need.

Harmful stereotypes harm everyone by undermining collective action.

Buskila & Perez 2022
The Impact of Victims’ Imagery On Charity Crowdfunding Campaigns How Photos of Victims Doing Nothing To Help Themselves Elicit Fewer Donations

Fehr & Gächter 2002
Altruistic punishment in humans

Metzl 2019
Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland

Some charts make people look like jerks.

Hiding outcome variability promotes harmful stereotypes and misattributions about the groups being visualized.

Jhangiani & Tarry 2022
Social Categorization and Stereotyping

Wilmer & Kerns 2022
What’s really wrong with bar graphs of mean values: variable and inaccurate communication of evidence on three key dimensions

Holder & Xiong 2022
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Harmful stereotypes harm everyone.

Charts that stereotype one group, hurt everyone by undermining collective action.

Snowden & Graaf 2019
The 'Undeserving Poor,' Racial Bias, and Medicaid Coverage of African Americans

Brown-Iannuzzi et al 2016
The Relationship Between Mental Representations of Welfare Recipients and Attitudes Toward Welfare

Gollust & Lynch 2011
Who Deserves Health Care? The Effects of Causal Attributions and Group Cues on Public Attitudes About Responsibility for Health Care Costs

Nelson & Kinder 1996
Issue Frames and Group-Centrism in American Public Opinion

Orchard et al 2017
County-level racial prejudice and the black-white gap in infant health outcomes

Cimpian & Salomon 2014
The inherence heuristic: An intuitive means of making sense of the world, and a potential precursor to psychological essentialism

Kite & Whitley 2016
Old-fashioned and contemporary forms of prejudice

Leitner et al 2016
Racial bias is associated with ingroup death rate for Blacks and Whites: Insights from Project Implicit

Buskila & Perez 2022
The Impact of Victims’ Imagery On Charity Crowdfunding Campaigns How Photos of Victims Doing Nothing To Help Themselves Elicit Fewer Donations

Power et al 1996
Priming Prejudice How Stereotypes and Counter-Stereotypes Influence Attribution of Responsibility and Credibility among Ingroups and Outgroups

Engel et al 2022
Policies to influence perceptions about COVID-19 risk: The case of maps

Attwell et al 2018
‘The Unhealthy Other’ How vaccine rejecting parents construct the vaccinating mainstream

Boundary busting.

Stereotypes are built on the perception of clean boundaries between different groups of people. If we want to live in a world that has nice things, we need to figure out ways to break down those boundaries.

Holder & Xiong 2022
Dispersion vs Disparity: Hiding Variability Can Encourage Stereotyping When Visualizing Social Outcomes

Holder & Padilla 2024
Must Be a Tuesday: Affect, Attribution, and Geographic Variability in Equity-Oriented Visualizations of Population Health Disparities

3iap
Codesigning Effective Score Reporting With ETS

Fear