How to Lie with Statistics - Part 6: The One-Dimensional Picture

Continuing with my previous post, here I summarize Chapter 5 of the book How to Lie with Statistics. This chapter is titled, The One-Dimensional Picture.

The deceptive practice described in this chapter can be succinctly summarized as follows: The danger of “varying the size of the objects in a chart.” What this means in practice is that – depending on what the aspirant is aiming to accomplish – he is trying to show a disproportionate picture to give an impression that may not necessarily be accurate.

For example, take a graph that may represent yearly car sale, put on that graph a large car to represent a high car sales and a small car for low car sales. Simply eye-balling the large and small car picture will leave you thinking exactly what the author intends – the author will simply point to the picture to show you how right he is. In other words, size proportions of picture charts matter as much as the metric being reported (e.g. average, etc.)