The Weighted Average Illusion: Biases in Perceived Mean Position in Scatterplots

• Published in: IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 987 - 997
• Main Authors: Hong, Matt-Heun, Witt, Jessica K., Szafir, Danielle Albers
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.01.2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Bias; Centroids; Correlation; Data models; Data points; Data visualization; Human-Subjects Quantitative Studies; Image color analysis; Mean; Perception & Cognition; Task analysis; Visualization

Scatterplots can encode a third dimension by using additional channels like size or color (e.g. bubble charts). We explore a potential misinterpretation of trivariate scatterplots, which we call the weighted average illusion , where locations of larger and darker points are given more weight toward...