Science Communication and Society, Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands.
Department of Psychology, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
PLoS One. 2022 Jun 15;17(6):e0265823. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265823. eCollection 2022.
Misleading graphs are a source of misinformation that worry many experts. Especially people with a low graph literacy are thought to be persuaded by graphs that misrepresent the underlying data. But we know little about how people interpret misleading graphs and how these graphs influence their opinions. In this study we focus on the effect of truncating the y-axis for a line chart which exaggerates an upgoing trend. In a randomized controlled trial, we showed participants either a normal or a misleading chart, and we did so in two different contexts. After they had seen the graphs, we asked participants their opinion on the trend and to give an estimation of the increase. Finally we measured their graph literacy. Our results show that context is the only significant factor in opinion-forming; the misleading graph and graph literacy had no effect. None of these factors had a significant impact on estimations for the increase. These results show that people might be less susceptible to misleading graphs than we thought and that context has more impact than a misleading y-axis.
误导性图表是信息错误的一个来源，这让许多专家感到担忧。特别是那些图表阅读能力较低的人，他们可能更容易被那些歪曲基础数据的图表所误导。但是，我们对于人们如何解读这些误导性图表以及这些图表如何影响他们的观点知之甚少。在这项研究中，我们关注的是折线图中截断 y 轴的效果，这会夸大上升趋势。在一项随机对照试验中，我们向参与者展示了正常的图表和误导性的图表，并且在两种不同的情境下进行了展示。在他们观看了图表之后，我们询问了参与者对趋势的看法，并让他们估计了增加量。最后，我们测量了他们的图表阅读能力。我们的结果表明，情境是形成观点的唯一重要因素；误导性图表和图表阅读能力没有影响。这些因素都没有对增加量的估计产生显著影响。这些结果表明，人们可能比我们想象的更不容易受到误导性图表的影响，而且情境的影响比误导性的 y 轴更大。
