Justin Wolfers' "A Persuasive Chart Showing How Persuasive Charts Are"

NEVER MIND ABOUT THIS ONE, GUYS!

https://hal.sorbonne-universite.fr/hal-01580259/file/Dragicevic_Jansen_2017.pdf

(Note the second author).

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Wolfers (writing for the New York Times) summarizes a study from Wansink and Tal (2014) in which participants were either a) presented with just in-text data about a drug trial or b) the text as well as with a bar graph that conveyed the exact same information. The results can be read below:

Wolfers/NYT

According to Wansink and Tal, the effects seem to be strongest in people who agreed with the statement "I believe in science". So, a graph makes a claim more "sciencier" and, therefore, more credible? Also, does this mean that science believers aren't being as critical because they already have an underlying belief in what they are reading?

I think this is a good way of conveying the power of graphs to students in a statistics class as well as the need for better scientific literacy/statistical consumerism/skepticism. I think it is also a good example of Elaboration Likelihood Model.

Finally, can we take just one moment to discuss the name of the original research article, Blinded with science: Trivial graphs and formula increase ad persuasiveness and belief in product efficacy. I'm always a fan of the "<funny cultural reference>: <serious science-y stuff>" naming convention oft used in scientific articles, and this is a real gem.

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations

Tyler Vigen has has created a long list of easy-to-paste-into-a-powerpoint graphs that illustrate that correlation does not equal causation. For instance, while per capita consumption of cheese and number of people who die by become tangled in their bed sheets may have a strong relationship (r = 0.947091), no one is saying that cheese consumption leads to bed sheet-related death. Although, you could pose The Third Variable question to your students for some of these relationships). Property of Tyler Vigens, http://i.imgur.com/OfQYQW8.png Vigen has also provided a menu of frequently used variables (deaths by tripping, sunlight by state) to help you look for specific examples. This portion is interactive, as you and your students can generate your own graphs. Below, I generated a graph of marriage rates in Pennsylvania and consumption of high fructose corn syrup. Generated at http://www.tylervigen.com/

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