Misleading visualizations go way back!

The ones who like to visit a museum and study paintings may already know that misleading visualizations go a long way back. A few years ago, I was that person, walking through a museum, wondering about all cues in paintings. In this blog, I want to show you what I learned from it. Therefore, I would like to take you to Paris in the 17th century. At that moment, Louis XIV was the king of France. Most people know him as the Sun King. For now, let’s say he got that nickname because he claimed that Versailles (his palace) and himself were the bright and shining center of the world (Koops, 2019). His point of view led to some exciting stories, but above all, some visualizations which had a huge impact on the centuries that followed.

The center of the world
Portraits and paintings, at that time, were the way to show others your wealth and status. Besides that, a painting is a product that should last forever, and therefore it was also the way to be immortalized (NPO, n.d.). Louis XIV (of course given his reputation) made use of this manner of communication, and so there are many portraits and paintings of him. I understand, you now may wonder what this has to do with misleading visualizations. Well, be patient I’ll come to that in a bit. First, I want to show you one example of such a painting of Louis XIV. Which figure do you think he is in the painting ‘Louis XIV’s Dutch War’?

It shouldn’t be a surprise that he is the man on the white horse, more or less in the center, but definitely painted brighter than the other figures. That brings me to some literature about visualizations. The salience principle, described in an article by Hegarty (2011), can be applied to this painting perfectly. The appearance of Louis XIV in this scene is made more salient than that of the bystanders. Besides that, I want to add that the position Louis XIV takes in this painting is in line with what Tversky (2011) calls central-peripheral organization. This basically means that important figures are more likely to put in the center and less important figures on the side. Interesting isn’t it that the external display was already manipulated in the 17th century! However, with this, the story of Louis XIV has not come to an end yet. We still have to discuss what this has to do with misleading the audience.

Image-building
Even though I think Louis XIV is an interesting person to talk about, this is not the main reason I wanted to mention him. Throughout his reign, Louis XIV was very focused on image-building. Let’s take his nickname, the Sun King, as an example here. Louis XIV and his ministers came up with a well-tried strategy for building-up his image as the Sun King, namely propaganda (Ziegler, 2015). Propaganda is a deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve the desired response (Historiek, 2019). Before I go on, I must say that propaganda includes visualizations, but can be found in all kinds of communication. Nevertheless, this kind of communication has a biased or misleading nature. For the sake of this blog’s topic, I’ll stick to discussing propaganda in the form of a visualization. In the case of Louis’ propaganda, an example can be found in the image in which the king is identified with the sun. By using such visualizations, he manipulates people’s cognitions and let them believe that he was the most powerful person.

Sounds like a good plan for building-up your imago, right? However, propaganda also has its downside, which is that it is hard to use it unobtrusively. Louis XIV experienced this too in the late 1660s. Back then, resistance against the methods of Louis’ policy arose (Ziegler, 2015).  However, this hasn’t stopped people from using propaganda, because centuries later, it is still here. Hitler used it often in World War II, and also Donald Trump is familiar with it.

Sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately
That said, let’s get back to misleading visualizations. Cairo (2015) argues that misleading visualization can be created on purpose, but also by accident. They call this the difference between a lie and a mistake. They define that a person who makes a misleading visualization on purpose is a liar. On the other side, someone who intends to communicate a message but doesn’t have the skills to represent it correctly can make an honest mistake (Cairo, 2015). For example, I can imagine that truncating an axis in a graphic, as described in a study by Yang et al. (2020) can be a mistake. Especially because, when creating a graph, sometimes the default option of a computer program is already misleading. No one will notice that this is the case until you are made aware of it, right? However, in the case of visualized propaganda, which is meant to manipulate, can this also happen by mistake? Or is the distinction Cairo makes not applicable to this form of a misleading visual, and is it always on purpose?

References

• Cairo, A. (2015). Graphics lies, misleading visuals: Reflections on the challenges and pitfalls of evidence-driven visual communication. In D. Bihanic (Ed.), New challenges for data design (pp. 103-116). Springer-Verlag, London.
• Hegarty, M. (2011). The Cognitive Science of Visual-Spatial Displays: Implications for Design. Topics in Cognitive Science, 3(3), 446–474. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2011.01150.x
• Historiek. (2019, April 17). Propaganda: betekenis, kenmerken en voorbeelden. https://historiek.net/propaganda-betekenis-kenmerken/80470/
• Koops, E. (2019, December 3). Lodewijk XIV (1638-1715) – De ‘Zonnekoning’ van Frankrijk. Historiek. https://historiek.net/lodewijk-xiv-zonnekoning-frankrijk/73414/
• NPO. (n.d.). Wat maakt de Gouden Eeuw zo bijzonder? NPO Focus. Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://npofocus.nl/artikel/7884/wat-maakt-de-gouden-eeuw-zo-bijzonder
• Tversky, B. (2011). Visualizing Thought. Topics in Cognitive Science, 3(3), 499–535. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01113.x
• Yang, B., Vargas-Restrepo, C., Stanley, M., & Marsh, E. (2020). Truncating bar graphs persistently misleads viewers. Journal of Applied Memory and Cognition, in press.
• Ziegler, H. (2015). Image battles under Louis XIV: some reflections.