  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.
