The impact of data reliability and semantic color congruence on trusting and reading visualizations

Trust in visualization has emerged as a key research topic as visualizations increasingly permeate modern media and life. Empirical work indicates that the design of a visualization can influence trust, but it remains unclear how specific design factors affect trust. The two crowdsourced studies reported on in this paper explore how two common design factors—semantic color congruence and the presence of data reliability information using a dotted stippling pattern overlay—impact map trust and map reading. Our analysis suggests that participants’ trust and map reading were largely unaffected by changes in color congruence. However, data reliability had a negative effect on map trust, map reading accuracy, and map reading confidence. Participants viewing a map with data reliability represented were significantly more likely to trust the map less and perform worse on map reading. These results are consistent across stimuli that vary in scale, data pattern, and topic. Additionally, we found that perceived risk functions as a mediating variable for the relationship between data reliability and map trust. These findings not only provide empirical evidence for previously proposed theoretical frameworks of trust in visualization, but also suggest preliminary design recommendations for using congruent colors and including indicators of data reliability in maps.