The DOI matches its Crossref record; 48 of the 51 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Showing People Behind Data: Does Anthropomorphizing Visualizations Elicit More Empathy for Human Rights Data?
Abstract
We investigate the impact of using anthropomorphized data graphics over standard charts on viewers' empathy for, and prosocial behavior toward suffering populations, in the context of human rights narratives. We present a series of experiments conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, in which we compare various forms of anthropomorphized data graphics-ranging from a single human figure that "fills up" to show proportional data, to separated groups of individual human beings-with a standard chart baseline. Each experiment uses two carefully crafted human rights data-driven stories to present the graphics. Contrary to our expectations, we consistently find that anthropomorphized data graphics and standard charts have very similar effects on empathy and prosocial behavior.
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Metadata
- Authors
- Boy, J., Pandey, A. V., Emerson, J., Satterthwaite, M., Nov, O., & Bertini, E.
- Affiliations
- United Nations (US)
- New York University (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2017-05-02
- Pages
- 5462-5474
- OpenAlex
- W2587329347
- Cited by
- 104
- References
- 51
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 3
- FWCI
- 2.64
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (G-107779-0)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design › Data Visualization and Analytics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Communication › Media Influence and Health
- Keywords
- data visualization, empathy, prosocial behavior, human rights narratives, data storytelling
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