Guardrail Selection in Line Charts to Contextualize Persuasive Visualizations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nadib, Khandaker Abrar, Kogan, Marina, Lex, Alexander, Lisnic, Maxim
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Nadib, Khandaker Abrar
Kogan, Marina
Lex, Alexander
Lisnic, Maxim
author_facet Nadib, Khandaker Abrar
Kogan, Marina
Lex, Alexander
Lisnic, Maxim
contents Charts used for persuasion can easily veer into being outright misleading when, for instance, cherry-picked data is paired with a deceptive caption, as is commonly encountered on social media. The rise of interactive time-series data explorers for hotly debated topics makes such framing easy to produce and spread. Post-hoc interventions like fact-checking often arrive too late and suffer from persistence of belief. Prior work suggests that guardrails, in the form of contextual comparison lines embedded directly into charts, can reduce these effects. We propose and evaluate a practical set of guardrail sampling strategies for implementing such contextual lines in real systems. In a preregistered mixed-design study with two real-world scenarios (COVID-19 and Stocks), participants viewed persuasive charts with different sets of guardrails and reported trust, estimated rank in the dataset, expressed their perceived completeness of context, as well as subjective preference for different tasks. Across scenarios, guardrails improved trust, accuracy of performance judgments, and perceived completeness of context compared to the control. Taken together, the study offers practical guardrail sampling methods, evidence of their contextual benefits, and insights into participants' preferences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_19017
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Guardrail Selection in Line Charts to Contextualize Persuasive Visualizations
Nadib, Khandaker Abrar
Kogan, Marina
Lex, Alexander
Lisnic, Maxim
Human-Computer Interaction
Charts used for persuasion can easily veer into being outright misleading when, for instance, cherry-picked data is paired with a deceptive caption, as is commonly encountered on social media. The rise of interactive time-series data explorers for hotly debated topics makes such framing easy to produce and spread. Post-hoc interventions like fact-checking often arrive too late and suffer from persistence of belief. Prior work suggests that guardrails, in the form of contextual comparison lines embedded directly into charts, can reduce these effects. We propose and evaluate a practical set of guardrail sampling strategies for implementing such contextual lines in real systems. In a preregistered mixed-design study with two real-world scenarios (COVID-19 and Stocks), participants viewed persuasive charts with different sets of guardrails and reported trust, estimated rank in the dataset, expressed their perceived completeness of context, as well as subjective preference for different tasks. Across scenarios, guardrails improved trust, accuracy of performance judgments, and perceived completeness of context compared to the control. Taken together, the study offers practical guardrail sampling methods, evidence of their contextual benefits, and insights into participants' preferences.
title Guardrail Selection in Line Charts to Contextualize Persuasive Visualizations
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19017