How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information

Written by Alberto Cairo

Narrated by Jonathan Yen

We've all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don't understand what we're looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous-and easier to share than ever. We associate charts with science and reason; the flashy visuals are both appealing and persuasive. Pie charts, maps, bar and line graphs, and scatter plots (to name a few) can better inform us, revealing patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives. In short, good charts make us smarter-if we know how to read them.

However, they can also lead us astray. Charts lie in a variety of ways-displaying incomplete or inaccurate data, suggesting misleading patterns, and concealing uncertainty-or are frequently misunderstood, such as the confusing cone of uncertainty maps shown on TV every hurricane season. To make matters worse, many of us are ill-equipped to interpret the visuals that politicians, journalists, advertisers, and even our employers present each day, enabling bad actors to easily manipulate them to promote their own agendas.

In How Charts Lie, data visualization expert Alberto Cairo teaches us to not only spot the lies in deceptive visuals, but also to take advantage of good ones to understand complex stories.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469075495

Reviews for How Charts Lie

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Books like this about the dangers of statistical graphics for the lay readership are common enough that they have become a genre. This one is better written than most, but its a little verbose for the amount of information contained. The book itself is unusually well produced by Norton.

[socprof9740 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As always, with Alberto Cairo, you get an entertaining, insightful, clearly-written book on the basics of data visualization, and the pitfalls that readers can encounter with charts. The stated goal is to develop the reader's graphical literary or graphicacy (a close cousin to numerical literacy and information literacy). In that goal, I would argue that book is very successful. It can be put in the hands of anyone as it is very accessible, with a lot of both serious and fun examples. In the era of fake news and distortions, it is a welcome antidote.
Which gets to my one source of irritation: Cairo's repeated assertion of his political moderation, sometimes couples with both-sides-do-it-ism. At this point in time, it is rather clear that one side has abandoned reason, logic, and basic truth-telling. This is not a case of both sides do it. And yes, we all tend to prefer charts that tell us reality is how we see it and supports our interpretation. But again, this framework does not apply to our current times of one side lying to a far worse extent, and isolating itself from anything outside Fox News.
As I said, this was my one source of irritation.
On a slightly different note: Cairo had a different publisher than for the Functional Art and The Truthful Art, and both books had better production, I thought, with softer paper and full color charts. That is not the case here. The color palette is much more limited, which is a shame when you want to show a significant number of charts.
That being said, again, a really great introductory book to the art and science of data visualization.

[encephalical · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a great overview of issues with creating and when reading charts and graphs. One of the things I really appreciated was that suboptimal, misleading, and not-recommended charts are clearly labeled as such. (For many books on charting I've found one has to carefully inspect the text to verify whether a given example is recommended or not.) I also like Cairo's repeated discussion of the role of ethics, both in authoring and in receiving a graphic.