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IEEE VIS 2024

Must Be A Tuesday

Study resources & materials

Links to the paper, VIS 2024 presentation, and all related material are available below. Also below are additional references from the VIS talk. If you have questions, comments, or interest in collaborating please get in touch.

Study Overview

Must Be A Tuesday: Affect, Attribution, and Geographic Variability in Equity-Oriented Visualizations of Population Health Disparities

Collaboration with Lace Padilla, examining equitable data design techniques for population mortality charts, published in 2024 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS)

Abstract

This study examines the impacts of public health communications visualizing risk disparities between racial and other social groups. It compares the effects of traditional bar charts to an alternative design emphasizing geographic variability with differing annotations and jitter plots. Whereas both visualization designs increased perceived vulnerability, behavioral intent, and policy support, the geo-emphasized charts were significantly more effective in reducing personal attribution biases. The findings also reveal emotionally taxing experiences for chart viewers from marginalized communities. This work suggests a need for strategic reevaluation of visual communication tools in public health to enhance understanding and engagement without reinforcing stereotypes or emotional distress.

Preprint
'Must Be a Tuesday': Affect, Attribution, and Geographic Variability in Equity-Oriented Visualizations of Population Health Disparities

Supplement
MBAT Data, Analysis, Supplemental Material

Related Original Research

IEEE VIS 2022

Dispersion vs Disparity

Dispersion Vs Disparity: How Hiding Variability Can Encourage Stereotyping When Visualizing Social Outcomes

Collaboration with Cindy Xiong Bearfield, exploring the impact of variability on attribution and stereotypes.

Research Paper
Dispersion vs Disparity: Hiding Variability Can Encourage Stereotyping When Visualizing Social Outcomes

Nightingale
Unfair Comparisons: How Visualizing Social Inequality Can Make It Worse

Study Details
Dispersion vs Disparity Research Project

Motivation
What Can Go Wrong? Deficit Thinking in Dataviz
A collaboration with Pieta Blakely

VIS Talk
Dispersion vs Disparity
Presentation for IEEE VIS 2022

IEEE VIS 2023

Polarizing Political Polls

Polarizing Political Polls: How Visualization Design Choices Can Shape Public Opinion and Increase Political Polarization

Collaboration with Cindy Xiong Bearfield, exploring how social normative influences are triggered by charts

Research Paper
Polarizing Political Polls: How Visualization Design Choices Can Shape Public Opinion and Increase Political Polarization

Nightingale
Divisive Dataviz: How Political Data Journalism Divides Our Democracy

Study Details
Polarizing Political Polls Research Project

Background
Through a Partisan Lens: How Prior Political Beliefs Override Information.

VIS Talk
Polarizing Political Polls IEEE VIS 2023 Talk

Other Related Material

Talks and Workshops

Equitable Epidemiology

Equitable Epidemiology: Deep Dive Workshops for Public Health Communicators
In these deep-dive workshops, we’ll seek to motivate an elevated duty-of-care for public health data communication, cover techniques for identifying prevalent risks in messaging, and propose alternative, evidence-backed chart choices for common use cases for visualizing population health outcomes.

Visual Villainy

Visual Villainy: How to Undermine Humanity with Dataviz
Outlier keynote on design considerations for ethical data visualization.

Miscellaneous Related Writing

Sketching Sketchy Bar Charts
Understanding how viewers underestimate variability when viewing bar charts of averages.

When is eleven scarier than twelve?
Understanding perceptions of relative health risk.

Read the room.
The 'ensemble effect' helps explain why Jitter Plots feel so intuitive.

Talk Citations

Downstream Detriments

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

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

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

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

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

Jhangiani & Tarry 2022
Other Determinants of Helping

Braveman & Dominguez 2021
Abandon 'Race.' Focus on Racism.

Hoffman et al 2016
Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites

Design Matters

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
Dispersion vs Disparity: Hiding Variability Can Encourage Stereotyping When Visualizing Social 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

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

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

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

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

Jhangiani & Tarry 2022
Other Determinants of Helping

Braveman & Dominguez 2021
Abandon 'Race.' Focus on Racism.

Hoffman et al 2016
Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites

Skitka et al 2002
Dispositions, Scripts, or Motivated Correction? Understanding Ideological Differences in Explanations for Social Problems

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

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

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