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

TL;DR

This study shows that visualization design choices, especially framing partisan divisions, can influence viewers' opinions and increase political polarization through social conformity effects.

Contribution

It reveals how visualization framing can induce social conformity and exacerbate political polarization, highlighting the impact of design choices on public attitudes.

Findings

Participants' attitudes shifted toward visualized group opinions.

Partisan framing increased inter-party attitude divergence.

Visualizations can promote social conformity and polarization.

Abstract

While we typically focus on data visualization as a tool for facilitating cognitive tasks (e.g., learning facts, making decisions), we know relatively little about their second-order impacts on our opinions, attitudes, and values. For example, could design or framing choices interact with viewers' social cognitive biases in ways that promote political polarization? When reporting on U.S. attitudes toward public policies, it is popular to highlight the gap between Democrats and Republicans (e.g., with blue vs red connected dot plots). But these charts may encourage social-normative conformity, influencing viewers' attitudes to match the divided opinions shown in the visualization. We conducted three experiments examining visualization framing in the context of social conformity and polarization. Crowdworkers viewed charts showing simulated polling results for public policy proposals. We varied framing (aggregating data as non-partisan "All US Adults," or partisan "Democrat" and "Republican") and the visualized groups' support levels. Participants then reported their own support for each policy. We found that participants' attitudes biased significantly toward the group attitudes shown in the stimuli and this can increase inter-party attitude divergence. These results demonstrate that data visualizations can induce social conformity and accelerate political polarization. Choosing to visualize partisan divisions can divide us further.