Cognitive Biases in Visualizations by Geoffrey Ellis

Author:Geoffrey Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319958316
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

The Planning Fallacy: In contrast to examining biases that manifest through visualization use, Dragicevic et al. [11] proposed using data visualizations to mitigate the planning fallacy, a common bias which occurs when people make time-lines for projects. They propose 4 ways in which visualizations may help prevent the planning fallacy. Namely, by providing, increased awareness of obstacles, self-logging of durations and predictions, tools for supporting group predictions, and social networking tools. Their discussion moves beyond individuals and into teams, as team projects may be more susceptible to planning fallacies, given that team members are often unaware of the each other’s schedules and skills. As a possible mitigating visualization meeting some of these criteria, they describe Aigner et al.’s PlanningLines [1] (shown in Fig. 7.3).2

The interplay between complex visualizations and visualization literacy could apply in this case. Specifically, Lee et al. [16] showed in their study evaluating the Visualization Literacy Assessment Test (VLAT) that high scores were positively associated with peoples’ ability to navigate unfamiliar visualizations. While the VLAT study focused on PCPs, the proposed PlanningLines visualization uses a variety of visual encodings - glyphs, links, overlapping bars for uncertainty, etc., which could imply that experience or training are necessary to achieve the goal of mitigating the planning fallacy. PlanningLines is an unfamiliar visualization and may cause issues for novices in a group who misinterpret it. Further, as the tool is proposed to be used in teams, it is unknown how individual differences such as visualization literacy will manifest when people with different abilities are modifying and interpreting the same visualizations.

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