Dogs, cats and polling charts.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental. Or not.
Imagine…
…a country where cats and dogs live in perfect harmony. A country named Furrmerica. Centuries ago, when cats & dogs arrived in Furrmerica, they came armed with lasers to defend themselves from wild humans, hunt their prey, and take land from the native bears. Today, lasers have become more dangerous: automated laser weapons can burn holes through bodies, lasers have been brought to school by pups & kittens with malevolent objectives, and accidents involving lasers are becoming increasingly common.
Conflict arises: should we ban all lasers? Should we impose more control over laser purchases? Will this hurt Furrmerica’s identity?
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd2694ddc-1cb6-4326-abba-8903f369199e_1820x1024.jpeg)
To better understand opinions, the Pet Research Center creates a survey and polls citizens across the country on their perspectives on the topic. They find that cats tend to oppose any form of control, whereas dogs in majority seem to favor it.
They put their findings in a beautiful traditional red and blue partisan range plot and shared it to the world.
What could go wrong?
The poll graphic gets shared across social media and newsletters. The news catches on, and the chart finds its way onto televisions and podcasts. Major outlets articles start discussing the opinions displayed in the graphic.
In homes, family dinners turn to open debates on the topic. Are you in favor? Against? Suddenly, positions become more polarized with dogs and cats, increasingly positioning towards the extremes.
Furrmerica goes up in flames. 🔥
Now, what if…
…lasers were in fact guns? Dogs Democrats, and cats Republicans? What if this story was about our current system and how visualizing polls could impact our vision of the world?
That is the question that Cindy Xiong and Eli Holder asked and tested in their most recent research. They conducted a series of experiments to test the impact of looking at polls on people’s opinions. They found that:
Public opinion dataviz can unreasonably influence viewers’ attitudes […]They have a social conformity effect. Charts showing that an idea is popular can make the idea more popular. When viewers saw that certain policies were popular with their groups, the policies became significantly more popular with the viewers themselves.
Visualizing polarized political attitudes can increase political polarization: For specific types of charts, these social influences can take the shape of polarization. When viewers see that attitudes are polarized by party, their own attitudes become more polarized across parties.
![Density plots showing the results of Eli and Cindy's experimentatioons where the partisan range plots has 19.8 plots of inter-party attitude gaps while the control is only 11.7 points. Density plots showing the results of Eli and Cindy's experimentatioons where the partisan range plots has 19.8 plots of inter-party attitude gaps while the control is only 11.7 points.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1793bbf2-d629-4725-a999-9baf6086b359_2336x888.png)
With graphics representing opinions being so prevalent, these findings demonstrate the significance of making conscientious data visualization choices to minimize deleterious impacts on public perception and decision-making or as Eli puts it:
Popular polling charts in the media are epistemically sketchy and should be reconsidered to minimize harmful side effects.
Go check out their detailed blog post to learn what we can do about this.
’Till next time,
Gabby (who had a lot of fun making a bunch of cats and dogs in suits on a chart, thanks Eli!)
Video of the week:
We talk a lot about careers and data visualization in Elevate. We took a break to talk about dream projects if we weren’t so busy.
Dataviz of the week
📿+ 📊 + Taylor Swift = ✨ in Bloomberg.
I am usually not a massive fan of physicalization of data but this story using beads is undeniably beautiful.