Cindy Xiong, Lisanne van Weelden, and Steven Franconeri

Read Here: https://visualthinking.psych.northwestern.edu/VisualizationCurse2017/Xiong, van Weelden & Franconeri InfoVis 2017 .pdf

• Researchers found that once people were primed to recognize a certain pattern in a set of visual data, they assumed that the naive observers would also immediately see the same pattern (even those who did not have access to the same information).

• When you see a connection, it’s virtually impossible to unsee it.

  • Humans always love to rationalize things and make patterns so the world starts to make a little more sense to them.

• Participants predicted that features that were visually salient to themselves would be salient to naive viewers

  • further drives home the point that participants “could not separate their own perspectives from that of another person.”
  • This point had me thinking about the basis of why exactly participants were unable to separate their own perspectives from others. Could this “curse of knowledge” be a measure of empathy? When taking standardized tests in public school, a common question that often came up was to interpret graphs. There are a lot of cases where there is no “right” answer, but there are answers that graders look for. It is natural, when fed a story, to think that this information translates to what the people testing you want you to see, and then to therefore, ideally think that others should “get” the same point as well.

• I’m also interested as to why some people were more “resistant” to the curse of knowledge.

  • How were some immune to this curse?
  • Could any of the participants have their own personal biases when it came to political leanings or a topic that they were especially passionate about (e.g. crime, education, immigration) that would affect what they saw as more salient and almost overpower the effects of the story given to them?

In the final paragraph of the article, the researchers discussed potential mitigation strategies that, interestly enough, reminded me of design thinking. In design classes, you are taught again and again that you are not your user. You always want your design to be human centered or user-centric, but it’s a common fallacy to fall prey to the “false-consensus effect” where you project your own behaviors and reactions, based off of your own knowledge, onto others. That is why it is so incredibly important from a user experience research perspective to talk to people in order to find out their needs and biases and current processes. UX researchers conduct usability tests in order to evaluate the heuristics of the products/features they design. This is to make sure that end users’ instincts when using the product matches up with what they are intended to do. You are not supposed to prime them but instead merely supposed to observe how they conduct certain tasks and rely on different peoples’ perspectives (e.g. “the wisdom of the crowd").