The Impact of Elicitation and Contrasting Narratives on Engagement, Recall and Attitude Change with News Articles Containing Data Visualization

TL;DR

This work examines how news articles that embed data visualizations influence readers’ engagement, recall, and attitudes. It tests two mechanisms—belief elicitation (Draw-trend and Categorize-trend) and contrasting narratives—across two Bayesian experiments using three drug-overdose data articles. Results show that Draw elicitation increases engagement via surprise and that contrasting narratives boost engagement but can impair recall, while elicitation alone yields limited, inconsistent attitude-change effects. The findings illuminate trade-offs between elaboration, memory accuracy, and attitude persuasion in data journalism, with implications for how visualizations and narratives should be designed to balance engagement and accurate information transmission.

Abstract

News articles containing data visualizations play an important role in informing the public on issues ranging from public health to politics. Recent research on the persuasive appeal of data visualizations suggests that prior attitudes can be notoriously difficult to change. Inspired by an NYT article, we designed two experiments to evaluate the impact of elicitation and contrasting narratives on attitude change, recall, and engagement. We hypothesized that eliciting prior beliefs leads to more elaborative thinking that ultimately results in higher attitude change, better recall, and engagement. Our findings revealed that visual elicitation leads to higher engagement in terms of feelings of surprise. While there is an overall attitude change across all experiment conditions, we did not observe a significant effect of belief elicitation on attitude change. With regard to recall error, while participants in the draw trend elicitation exhibited significantly lower recall error than participants in the categorize trend condition, we found no significant difference in recall error when comparing elicitation conditions to no elicitation. In a follow-up study, we added contrasting narratives with the purpose of making the main visualization (communicating data on the focal issue) appear strikingly different. Compared to the results of study 1, we found that contrasting narratives improved engagement in terms of surprise and interest but interestingly resulted in higher recall error and no significant change in attitude. We discuss the effects of elicitation and contrasting narratives in the context of topic involvement and the strengths of temporal trends encoded in the data visualization.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: "You Draw It" published in TheUpshot of New York Times YouDrawIt.
• Figure 2: Three articles participants read during Study 1 regardless of elicitation conditions.
• Figure 3: Contrasting narratives on gun violence and HIV deaths added to contrast the sharp rise in drug overdose deaths.
• Figure 4: Study design and procedure. Study 1 focuses on evaluating the impact of belief elicitation while study 2 added contrasting narratives to evaluate its impact on attitude change, recall, and engagement.
• Figure 5: Recall accuracy (RMSE) by condition for Study 1 and Study 2. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean.