Designing for more than efficacy: investigating the role of anthropographics on compassion.

Abstract

Anthropographics are data visualizations about people that are designed with the intent of evoking feelings such as compassion or empathy. However, there is no evidence in the literature to confirm to what extent anthropographics make people compassionate with the persons whose data is represented. This work contributes to advance the understanding of anthropographics by refining and extending the design space of such visualizations as well as looking for evidence on how much they affect people’s compassion. Although results from an in-the-wild study were inconclusive, a crowdsource experiment found a small effect when comparing an anthropographic with a bar chart. The former leads people to feel a bit worse about the situation of persons in need and donate a little more to help them. This is the first work that finds evidence in favor of the hypothesis that specific visualization designs may make people more compassionate. This thesis opens a new perspective for studying what design elements are responsible for such an effect.