  Students who eat breakfast more frequently tend to have a higher grade point
average. From this data, many people might confidently state that a
before-school breakfast program would lead to higher grades. This is a
reasoning error, because correlation does not necessarily indicate causation --
X and Y can be correlated without one directly causing the other. While this
error is pervasive, its prevalence might be amplified or mitigated by the way
that the data is presented to a viewer. Across three crowdsourced experiments,
we examined whether how simple data relations are presented would mitigate this
reasoning error. The first experiment tested examples similar to the
breakfast-GPA relation, varying in the plausibility of the causal link. We
asked participants to rate their level of agreement that the relation was
correlated, which they rated appropriately as high. However, participants also
expressed high agreement with a causal interpretation of the data. Levels of
support for the causal interpretation were not equally strong across
visualization types: causality ratings were highest for text descriptions and
bar graphs, but weaker for scatter plots. But is this effect driven by bar
graphs aggregating data into two groups or by the visual encoding type? We
isolated data aggregation versus visual encoding type and examined their
individual effect on perceived causality. Overall, different visualization
designs afford different cognitive reasoning affordances across the same data.
High levels of data aggregation by graphs tend to be associated with higher
perceived causality in data. Participants perceived line and dot visual
encodings as more causal than bar encodings. Our results demonstrate how some
visualization designs trigger stronger causal links while choosing others can
help mitigate unwarranted perceptions of causality.
