Abstract
Human decisions are prone to biases, and this is no less true for decisions made within data visualizations. Bias mitigation strategies often focus on the person, by educating people about their biases, typically with little success. We focus instead on the system, presenting the first evidence that altering the design of an interactive visualization tool can mitigate a strong bias - the attraction effect. Participants viewed 2D scatterplots where choices between superior alternatives were affected by the placement of other suboptimal points. We found that highlighting the superior alternatives weakened the bias, but did not eliminate it. We then tested an interactive approach where participants completely removed locally dominated points from the view, inspired by the elimination by aspects strategy in the decision-making literature. This approach strongly decreased the bias, leading to a counterintuitive suggestion: tools that allow removing inappropriately salient or distracting data from a view may help lead users to make more rational decisions.
Highlights
We often misweigh information based on its salience, or how congruent it is with our fears or desires
The attraction effect seems to be a robust cognitive bias that has been observed in many different contexts besides visualized data, such as when people buy commercial products [82], choose a meal in a menu [37], choose an employee to hire [41], and vote [39, 67]
We focused instead on the system, providing the first empirical evidence that interactive visualizations can be effectively used to mitigate cognitive biases
Summary
We often misweigh information based on its salience, or how congruent it is with our fears or desires. 2.1.1 Improve education “Training in rules” techniques examine the benefits of formal training in economics (e.g., normative theory) [54], social and natural sciences [56], and statistics (e.g., law of small numbers) often by combining abstract rules for normative reasoning with concrete examples [13, 30] These techniques require extensive training, and the improvements that they bring tend to weaken over time [31]. Computer games and simulations [34] provide immediate feedback, structured learning environments, and tailored instructions based on performance [16,26,58,60] They have proven useful in reducing the fundamental attribution error, bias blind spot, and confirmation bias [16, 60], after the session and even eight weeks later. Computer games appear more effective than videos probably because they provide personalized feedback and hands-on experience [60]
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