Abstract
People worldwide use SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) visualizations to make life and death decisions about pandemic risks. Understanding how these visualizations influence risk perceptions to improve pandemic communication is crucial. To examine how COVID-19 visualizations influence risk perception, we conducted two experiments online in October and December of 2020 (N = 2549) where we presented participants with 34 visualization techniques (available at the time of publication on the CDC’s website) of the same COVID-19 mortality data. We found that visualizing data using a cumulative scale consistently led to participants believing that they and others were at more risk than before viewing the visualizations. In contrast, visualizing the same data with a weekly incident scale led to variable changes in risk perceptions. Further, uncertainty forecast visualizations also affected risk perceptions, with visualizations showing six or more models increasing risk estimates more than the others tested. Differences between COVID-19 visualizations of the same data produce different risk perceptions, fundamentally changing viewers’ interpretation of information.
Highlights
People worldwide use SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) visualizations to make life and death decisions about pandemic risks
Risk communicators have responded to the urgent need to inform the public about COVID-19 risks with an unprecedented deployment of data visualizations, without evidence of how these visualizations influence the global population’s understanding of pandemic risk
Of the visualizations developed by government agencies, news media, and academics, the most common is a line chart that shows COVID-19 metrics over time[1]
Summary
People worldwide use SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) visualizations to make life and death decisions about pandemic risks. Understanding how these visualizations influence risk perceptions to improve pandemic communication is crucial. Understanding the effects of forecast visualizations on risk perceptions during a pandemic is vital for ensuring that the public takes appropriate actions to mitigate the spread of a virus and reduce personal risk. Because we have numerous ways to visualize the same data, risk communicators may inadvertently use a visualization technique that minimizes viewers’ perception of their pandemic risk, indirectly contributing to inappropriate actions. Designed visualizations can be powerful tools for communicating health risks, those that include probability, which can be highly challenging for many people to understand. Truncating the y-axis can result in viewers overestimating minor differences[9, 10], rainbow color schemes can create visual artifacts that viewers think
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
