Accounting for Availability Biases in Information Visualization

Evanthia Dimara, Pierre Dragicevic, INRIA, France and Anastasia Bezerianos, Univ Paris-Sud & CNRS (LRI), INRIA

Availability heuristic is a strategy that people use to make quick decisions but often lead to systematic errors. We propose three ways that visualization could facilitate unbiased decision-making. First, visualizations can alter the way our memory stores the events for later recall, so as to improve users’ long-term intuitions. Second, the known biases could lead new visualization guidelines. Third, we suggest the design of decision-making tools that extend heuristics rather than target to exhaustive comparisons or automated solutions.