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Is That Graph Lying to You? Pictures That Persuade · Truth in Motion with Dr. Jocelyn

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Truth in Motion with Dr.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Jocelyn, where insight, clarity, and wisdom help you thrive.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and thank you for being here.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday we looked at two small words, average and risk.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: We saw a doubled risk that meant one more woman in 7,000, and a 44% benefit that came down to about one person in a hundred.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And we learned to ask percent of what?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Today we look at pictures, graphs, charts, and images, because sometimes the number is honest and the picture around it isn't.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Picture a doctor between patients flipping through a medical journal.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Between the studies, there are glossy drug ads, and in some of those ads, there's a clean, colorful graph, a line climbing, bars that tower over the competition, and it takes two seconds to look at and it leaves an impression.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: In 2003, a team of researchers decided to check those graphs.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: They went through drug advertisements in 10 major American journals.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: These are ads aimed at doctors, the people deciding what to prescribe.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: They found 74 scientific graphs.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: More than a third of them, 36%, contained numeric distortion.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: The picture didn't match the drug's own numbers, and that kind of distortion is specifically prohibited by FDA regulations.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: They found something else.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Two out of three graphs had extra decoration, design that carried no information at all.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And only 4% showed how spread out the results were.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: More than a third of the time the picture was bent and the people looking at it were our doctors.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a reason to distrust every doctor.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's a reason to understand that our doctors are being sold to as well.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one more reason I want every one of us to be able to read a chart for ourselves.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Why this matters?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because a picture reaches us before our thinking does.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: We read words one at a time.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: We work through numbers, but a picture, we take it in all at once.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: In a single glance, we feel it.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Up is good or up is scary.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Big is important.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Falling means it's over.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And many of us make real decisions from that feeling.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Whether to take a medication, whether to worry, whether to trust the person showing us the chart.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: When a picture moves us before we've asked a single question, whoever drew it is doing our thinking for us.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where I stand.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: I believe a graph is an argument, not a fact.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Every chart is made by someone who chose where the line starts, what gets left out, how tall to draw the bars, and which colors to use.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Those choices are never neutral.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: They're telling us how to feel.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make every graph a lie.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the most honest, life-saving truths in medicine were told with pictures.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: But it means I look at the picture the way I look at any claim.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Who made this?
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: What do they want me to feel?
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And does the picture match the numbers?
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll say this plainly: when a company that sells a product shows me a beautiful dramatic chart, I slow down, not because I assume they're lying, because I know the picture was designed to sell.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's go back to the little book we've been following all week, How to Lie with Statistics from 1954.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Daryl Huff gave one of this chapters a wonderful name, the G Wiz Graph.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the trick.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine a line showing something that rose by 10% over a year, drawn on a full chart starting from zero.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a gentle slope, modest and honest.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now Huff says, chop off the bottom of the chart.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: Start the side of the graph close to where the line begins.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Suddenly, the same 10% climbs halfway up the page.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Stretch the scale a little more, and it looks in Huff's words, livelier than 100% is entitled to look.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Same numbers, different feeling.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: He gave real examples from his own life.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: A gas company published a chart comparing 10 years of rising living costs with the price of gas.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Living costs had gone up about 60%.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Gas prices had dropped about 4%.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: But the chart was cut off at 90%.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: On that chart, living costs looked like they had more than tripled, and the price of gas looked like it had fallen by a third.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing on that chart was false.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: The bottom was simply missing.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Huff found another one in a business magazine from 1938.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Government payrolls had risen from about$19.5 million to about$20.2 million.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's an increase of less than 4%.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: But the chart was cut and stretched, so the lines shot straight to the top of the page, under a headline that shouted, government payrolls up.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Drawn Honestly, Huff showed the same rise was a gentle, modest climb, hardly worth a headline at all.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Notice what that does to us?
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: The headline tells us to be alarmed, the picture agrees, and unless we look at the numbers on the side, we never find out that the change was tiny.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: So here's our first question every time.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: Where does the line start?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: If the bottom of the chart isn't zero, the picture may be shouting about something that's only whispering.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: Huff had another chapter about pictures instead of lines.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: He called it the one-dimensional picture.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Say one worker earns$30 a week and another earns 60, twice as much.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: To show it, an artist draws two money bags, the second one twice as tall.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: But when you draw a bag twice as tall, it also gets twice as wide, and it looks twice as deep.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Two times two times two is eight.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: Huff wrote that while the chart says twice, it leaves the lasting impression of an overwhelming eight to one ratio.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: We see this all the time in health.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: A pill that's drawn larger, a heart, an organ, a bottle, a person, sized up to make a difference look enormous.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: So our second question is, does the size of the picture match the size of the number?
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now let me tell you the other side of the story, because a picture can also tell the truth so clearly that it changes the world.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: In November of 1854, Florence Nightingale arrived at the British Army Hospital in Scutari, near Constantinople, during the Crimean War.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: What she found was terrible.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: The hospital was filthy and crawling with vermin.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: It sat on a broken sewer, supplies were missing, and most of the soldiers dying there weren't dying of their wounds, they were dying of disease.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: By February of 1855, the death rate at the hospital had reached 42%.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then a sanitary commission arrived.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: They repaired the sewers, they improved the ventilation, and the death rate fell.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Nightingale knew that numbers in a table wouldn't move the people in power.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: So she drew them.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Her diagram, published in 1858 in a report presented to the Secretary of State for War, looked like a flower, with a wedge for each month.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Blue for deaths from preventable disease, red for deaths from wounds.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: The blue wedges were enormous, the red ones were small.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone could see it in one glance.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Most of these men didn't have to die.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Her pictures helped persuade the British government to reform sanitation in military hospitals, and she became the first woman elected to the Royal Statistical Society.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Same tool, a picture, used to hide the truth or to reveal it.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: The difference is the heart of the person holding the pen.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: So how do we protect ourselves and still learn from the pictures that are honest?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: Here's what I want us to carry.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Five quick questions.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Where does the line start?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Look at the side of the graph.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: If it doesn't start at zero, ask whether the picture is making the change look bigger than it is.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: What's on the bottom?
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: Check the dates or the categories.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Are they in order?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: How long a stretch of time is shown?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: A short window can hide the bigger picture.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: Does the size match the number?
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: When a picture or shapes are used, ask whether a thing drawn twice as big really means twice as much.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: What's missing?
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: No labels, no numbers, no source.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: An honest chart wants us to check it.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: A chart with nothing to check deserves a harder look.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Who made it and what do they want me to feel?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hopeful, afraid, ready to buy?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Notice the feeling.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: Then go back and look at the numbers.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: These take seconds, and once we start asking them, we can't stop seeing.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Here's something hopeful.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: The most honest chart in your life may be one you draw yourself.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you've kept a log of your sleep, your energy, your pain, your mood, whatever your symptom is that you want to track, you can turn it into a simple picture.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: Put the days along the bottom in order, put your score from 0 to 10 up the side, starting at zero, then mark a dot for each day.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: No one is selling you anything with that chart.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you watching your own body over time.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when you bring it to your practitioner, they can see in one glance what might take 20 minutes to explain.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's what Florence Nightingale did.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: She took what she observed and she drew it honestly so others could see.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: This week we look behind the number.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Here's today's practice.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Find one charter graph about health, a news story, an ad, a social media post, a label.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Ask the five questions.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: Where does the line start?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: What's on the bottom?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: Does the size match the number?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: What's missing?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Who made it?
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: And what do they want me to feel?
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Then write one line.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: This picture is honest.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: This picture is stretched, or I can't tell.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Each one of those answers is information.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Today we saw that more than a third of the graphs and drug ads for doctors didn't match their own numbers.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: We saw how cutting off the bottom of a chart can turn a small rise into a mountain, and how a picture drawn twice as tall can look eight times as big.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw Florence Nightingale draw the truth so clearly that it changed how soldiers were cared for.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And we saw why it matters.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: A picture reaches us before our thinking does.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: When we pause and ask five quick questions, we get our thinking back.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Tomorrow we bring the whole week together.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: How to talk back to a number kindly and clearly, whether it comes from a headline, a company, or a professional we trust.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'll meet you there.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Keep the conversation going.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Find your next steps in notes from a fellow traveler, my blog.