  Cognitive biases have been shown to lead to faulty decision-making. Recent
research has demonstrated that the effect of cognitive biases, anchoring bias
in particular, transfers to information visualization and visual analytics.
However, it is still unclear how users of visual interfaces can be anchored and
the impact of anchoring on user performance and decision-making process. To
investigate, we performed two rounds of between-subjects, in-laboratory
experiments with 94 participants to analyze the effect of visual anchors and
strategy cues in decision-making with a visual analytic system that employs
coordinated multiple view design. The decision-making task is identifying
misinformation from Twitter news accounts. Participants were randomly assigned
one of three treatment groups (including control) in which participant training
processes were modified. Our findings reveal that strategy cues and visual
anchors (scenario videos) can significantly affect user activity, speed,
confidence, and, under certain circumstances, accuracy. We discuss the
implications of our experiment results on training users how to use a newly
developed visual interface. We call for more careful consideration into how
visualization designers and researchers train users to avoid unintentionally
anchoring users and thus affecting the end result.
