Polarizing Political Polls: How Visualization Design Choices Can Shape Public Opinion and Increase Political Polarization
Eli Holder, Cindy Xiong Bearfield

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…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsData Visualization and Analytics · Social Media and Politics · Climate Change Communication and Perception
