Analyzing the misperception of exponential growth in graphs

Ciccione, Lorenzo; Sablé-Meyer, Mathias; Dehaene, Stanislas

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105112

Cited by 10 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…This finding suggests that participants treated the scatterplots as an ensemble, without serially processing each item: in fact, if that was the case, we should have observed an increment in response times proportional to the number of points in the dataset. Fast intuitive statistical judgments on graphs with Gaussian noise thus seem to operate similarly to ensemble perception, the human ability to rapidly extract the "average" of visually displayed items, without focusing on each particular element in the set (Cui & Liu, 2021;Whitney & Yamanashi Leib, 2018; but see, in the presence of outliers in the graph: Ciccione et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…First, we tested intuitive graphics in a large-scale online sample of educated adults from all over the world, from which we obtained information about several demographical aspects, together with self-reports of mathematical and statistical understanding. Testing intuitive graphics on such a large and diverse population offered insights into the predictors of these skills; also, it provided a large-scale replication of psychophysical results previously obtained with a reduced sample in a controlled laboratory environment (Ciccione & Dehaene, 2021), thus contributing to the growing but still scarce body of research on psychophysical measurements outside the lab (e.g., Ciccione et al, 2022;de Leeuw & Motz, 2016;Halberda et al, 2012;Semmelmann & Weigelt, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

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Graphicacy across age, education, and culture: a new tool to assess intuitive graphics skills

Ciccione

Sablé-Meyer

Boissin

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Data plots are widely used in science, journalism and politics, since they efficiently allow to depict a large amount of information. Graphicacy, the ability to understand graphs, thus became a fundamental cultural skill. Here, we introduce a new measure of graphicacy that assesses the ability to detect a trend in noisy scatterplots (does this graph go up or down?). In 3943 educated participants, responses vary as a sigmoid function of the t-value that a statistician would compute to detect a significant trend. We find a minimum level of core graphicacy even in unschooled participants living in remote Namibian villages (N=87) and 6-year-old 1st-graders who never read a graph (N=27). However, the sigmoid slope (the graphicacy index) varies across participants, increases with education, and tightly correlates with statistical knowledge, showing that experience contributes to refining graphical intuitions. Our tool is publicly available online and allows to quickly evaluate intuitive graphics skills.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 91%

Graphicacy across age, education, and culture: a new tool to assess intuitive graphics skills

Ciccione

Sablé-Meyer

Boissin

et al. 2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A problem with these data is that average people, who do not work with these issues everyday like astrophysicists do, have insurmountable difficulty understanding intuitively massive numbers of evolutionary and geologic magnitude. Thus, the magnitude of difference between and is beyond the average layperson’s—as well as the average scientist’s—comprehension as it is known for long (see Ciccione et al 2022 ; Jevons 1871 ; Wagenaar and Sagaria 1975 ).…”

Section: The Role Of Mineral Economics In Transdisciplinary Processes...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of transdisciplinarity for mineral economics and mineral resource management: coping with fallacies related to phosphorus in science and practice

Scholz

Steiner

2022

Miner Econ

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Mineral economics is a genuine multidisciplinary field dealing with economic and policy matters related to the production, distribution, and consumption of mineral commodities. We discuss why the increasing complexity, ambiguity, ambivalence, and social contestation of subjects of mineral economics promote the participation of mineral economists in transdisciplinary processes. These processes relate (a) knowledge from targeted interdisciplinary processes and (b) mitigated discourses among different stakeholders to provide (c) a shared problem definition and to attain shared basic knowledge about problem transformation science and practice. We discuss known examples of misperceptions regarding minerals (phosphorus), such as an imminent scarcity threat, the incorrectly understood causations of the 2007/2008 price peak and present the phosphorus ore-grades increased by 3.2% between 1983 and 2013 fallacies (which is based on the Simpson’s paradox), and only few countries have mineable reserves fallacy. Here, we also illuminate motivations underlying several mineral economics–related misunderstandings. We argue that societally relevant questions require an honest mineral economics knowledge brokership. The example of the Global TraPs project, which targeted sustainable phosphorus management, is presented. Honest brokership to attain a clearinghouse function of science requires trust formation in society. We argue that this calls for increasing the understandability of relationships that are not well-understood, such as “if prices rise, so do stocks.” Wellmer and Becker-Platen’s feedback control cycle may be considered an example of how complex mineral economics can become and how challenging it is to be understandable to scientists from different disciplines and faculties as well as to practitioners whose knowledge may well be used to cope with the complexity of given problems. Thus, the present paper represents a plea for mutual learning between science and practice in order to understand the complex social and economic challenges of mineral resource dynamics.

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“…Recently growing attention has been paid to the choice of the scale used in graphical representations of exponential growth (usually, line charts or scatterplots). In particular, as the logarithmic scale makes the exponential curve look linear, it can eliminate the underestimation bias and thus render the graphs more comprehensible ( Ciccione et al, 2022 ). For instance, Hutzler et al (2021) showed that participants looking at epidemiological data with logarithmically scaled growth curves have made significantly more accurate estimates than those who looked at linearly scaled graphs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is my visualization better than yours? Analyzing factors modulating exponential growth bias in graphs

Melnik-Leroy

Aidokas²,

Dzemyda³

et al. 2023

Front. Psychol.

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Humans tend to systematically underestimate exponential growth and perceive it in linear terms, which can have severe consequences in a variety of fields. Recent studies attempted to examine the origins of this bias and to mitigate it by using the logarithmic vs. the linear scale in graphical representations. However, they yielded conflicting results as to which scale induces more perceptual errors. In the current study, in an experiment with a short educational intervention, we further examine the factors modulating the exponential bias in graphs and suggest a theoretical explanation for our findings. Specifically, we test the hypothesis that each of the scales can induce misperceptions in a particular context. In addition to this, we explore the effect of mathematical education by testing two groups of participants (with a background in humanities vs. formal sciences). The results of this study confirm that when used in an inadequate context, these scales can have a dramatic effect on the interpretation of visualizations representing exponential growth. In particular, while the log scale leads to more errors in graph description tasks, the linear scale misleads people when they have to make predictions on the future trajectory of exponential growth. The second part of the study revealed that the difficulties with both scales can be reduced by means of a short educational intervention. Importantly, while no difference between participants groups was observed prior to the intervention, participants with a better mathematical education showed a stronger learning effect at posttest. The findings of this study are discussed in light of a dual-process model.

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Analyzing the misperception of exponential growth in graphs

Cited by 10 publications

References 42 publications

Graphicacy across age, education, and culture: a new tool to assess intuitive graphics skills

Graphicacy across age, education, and culture: a new tool to assess intuitive graphics skills

The role of transdisciplinarity for mineral economics and mineral resource management: coping with fallacies related to phosphorus in science and practice

Is my visualization better than yours? Analyzing factors modulating exponential growth bias in graphs

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