IEEE VIS 2024 Content: The Impact of Elicitation and Contrasting Narratives on Engagement, Recall and Attitude Change with News Articles Containing Data Visualization

The Impact of Elicitation and Contrasting Narratives on Engagement, Recall and Attitude Change with News Articles Containing Data Visualization

Milad Rogha -

Subham Sah -

Alireza Karduni -

Douglas Markant -

Wenwen Dou -

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DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2024.3355884

Room: Bayshore II

2024-10-17T17:57:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2024-10-17T17:57:00Z
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Data visualizations in news articles not only inform but also play a crucial role in shaping public opinion on important issues. Can data visualization researchers and designers ‘nudge’ people toward more elaborative thinking? Inspired by a New York Times article, we conducted two experiments to explore how eliciting prior beliefs and contrasting narratives influence engagement, attitude change, and recall.
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Keywords

Data Visualization, Market Research, Visualization, Uncertainty, Data Models, Correlation, Attitude Control, Belief Elicitation, Visual Elicitation, Data Visualization, Contrasting Narratives

Abstract

News articles containing data visualizations play an important role in informing the public on issues ranging from public health to politics. Recent research on the persuasive appeal of data visualizations suggests that prior attitudes can be notoriously difficult to change. Inspired by an NYT article, we designed two experiments to evaluate the impact of elicitation and contrasting narratives on attitude change, recall, and engagement. We hypothesized that eliciting prior beliefs leads to more elaborative thinking that ultimately results in higher attitude change, better recall, and engagement. Our findings revealed that visual elicitation leads to higher engagement in terms of feelings of surprise. While there is an overall attitude change across all experiment conditions, we did not observe a significant effect of belief elicitation on attitude change. With regard to recall error, while participants in the draw trend elicitation exhibited significantly lower recall error than participants in the categorize trend condition, we found no significant difference in recall error when comparing elicitation conditions to no elicitation. In a follow-up study, we added contrasting narratives with the purpose of making the main visualization (communicating data on the focal issue) appear strikingly different. Compared to the results of Study 1, we found that contrasting narratives improved engagement in terms of surprise and interest but interestingly resulted in higher recall error and no significant change in attitude. We discuss the effects of elicitation and contrasting narratives in the context of topic involvement and the strengths of temporal trends encoded in the data visualization.