Cristiane S Paula, Isabel A S Bordin, Jair Jesus Mari, Luciane Velasque, Luis A Rohde, Evandro S F Coutinho
The mental health care gap among children and adolescents: data from an epidemiological survey from four Brazilian regions
PloS one
analyst scientist belief world works thinking biased favor belief therefore one bedrock principle science minimize bias testing predictions ones belief objective data interpreting visualized data complex perceptual cognitive process two crowdsourced experiments demonstrate supposedly objective assessments strength correlational relationship influenced strongly viewer believes existence relationship participants viewed scatterplots depicting relationship meaningful variable pairs eg number environmental regulations air quality estimated correlations also estimated correlation scatterplots labeled instead generic x axes separate section also reported strongly believed correlation meaningful variable pairs participants estimated correlations accurately viewed scatterplots labeled generic axes compared scatterplots labeled meaningful variable pairs furthermore viewers believed two variables strong relationship overestimated correlations variables rvalue 01 believed variables unrelated underestimated correlations rvalue 01 data visualizations typically thought present objective truths viewer results suggest existing personal beliefs bias even objective statistical values people extract data