As yet another semester of teaching gets under way, I return to this useful graph. There are two points to be had - one obvious and one less so. The obvious - as stated - is the misleading effect of a truncated y-axis (the graph does not go to zero, which magnifies the effect).
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Reposted from
Dr. Jess Hartnett
New blog post: Truncated y-axis example featuring female celebrities. Includes pocket-sized Sabrina Carpenter. notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/2024/12/trun...
Comments
The point is that students need to pay attention to the y-axis and
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The more subtle point is that in any bar graph, the width of the bar is also important. Not only should it be consistent bar-to-bar (it is not in the graph above), but it can't be too fat. Because the human eye will naturally compare area-to-area
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And yes, sometimes tables are better than graphs.
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