News articles containing data visualizations play an important role in informing the public on issues ranging from public health to politics. Recent research on the persuasive appeal of data visualizations suggests that prior attitudes can be notoriously difficult to change. Inspired by an NYT article, we designed two experiments to evaluate the impact of elicitation and contrasting narratives on attitude change, recall, and engagement. We hypothesized that eliciting prior beliefs leads to more elaborative thinking that ultimately results in higher attitude change, better recall, and engagement. Our findings revealed that visual elicitation leads to higher engagement in terms of feelings of surprise. While there is an overall attitude change across all experiment conditions, we did not observe a significant effect of belief elicitation on attitude change. With regard to recall error, while participants in the draw trend elicitation exhibited significantly lower recall error than participants in the categorize trend condition, we found no significant difference in recall error when comparing elicitation conditions to no elicitation. In a follow-up study, we added contrasting narratives with the purpose of making the main visualization (communicating data on the focal issue) appear strikingly different. Compared to the results of study 1, we found that contrasting narratives improved engagement in terms of surprise and interest but interestingly resulted in higher recall error and no significant change in attitude. We discuss the effects of elicitation and contrasting narratives in the context of topic involvement and the strengths of temporal trends encoded in the data visualization.

翻译：包含数据可视化的新闻文章在向公众传达从公共卫生到政治等议题方面扮演着重要角色。近期关于数据可视化说服力的研究表明，先验态度往往难以改变。受《纽约时报》一篇文章启发，我们设计了两项实验，以评估引发与对比叙述对态度变化、记忆及参与度的影响。我们假设，引发先验信念会促使更深入的思考，最终导致更高的态度变化、更好的记忆和参与度。研究结果显示，视觉引发在惊喜感方面提高了参与度。尽管所有实验条件下均观察到总体态度变化，但我们未发现信念引发对态度变化有显著影响。在记忆错误方面，绘制趋势的引发条件下参与者的记忆错误显著低于分类趋势条件，但将引发条件与无引发条件相比，未发现记忆错误存在显著差异。在后续研究中，我们增加了对比叙述，旨在使主可视化（传达焦点议题数据）显得截然不同。与实验一结果相比，我们发现对比叙述在惊喜感和兴趣方面提升了参与度，但有趣的是，这导致了更高的记忆错误，且态度未发生显著变化。我们结合议题卷入度及数据可视化中编码的时间趋势强度，讨论了引发与对比叙述的作用。