Question

Deceptive Graphs. In Exercises 17–20, identify how the graph is deceptive.

Self-Driving Vehicles In a survey of adults, subjects were asked if they felt comfortable being in a self-driving vehicle. The accompanying graph depicts the results (based on data from TE Connectivity).

Short answer

The graph is deceptive in a way that falsely represents the total number of subjects who said Yes and No since the vertical axis does not begin from zero.

This leads to a wrong interpretation of the fact that the number of subjects who responded No is approximately five times greater than the number of subjects who responded Yes when the actual difference is nearly half.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

A graph depicts the number of respondents who feel comfortable (responded yes) in a self-driving vehicle and the number of subjects who do not (responded No).

Describe a deceptive graph

A deceptive graph is one that gives an illusion and provides misleading information about the dataset. A deceptive graph can be observed by a simple observation of the graphs.

Identify the traits of the graph

By observing the graph, it seems that there is a huge difference in the number of subjects who responded in affirmation and the number of subjects who responded negatively because the length of the bar corresponding to “No” is much taller than the length of the bar corresponding to “Yes.”

However,the given graph has a vertical scale that does not begin from zero,due to which the difference in the lengths of the bars is expressed greatly.

Observing the values, the number of responses with Yes is 300 and the number of responses with No is close to 700.

Since the vertical axis starts from 200 and not zero, the difference appears to be approximately five times. In reality, the difference in the number of subjects who responded negatively is about 2.5 times greater than the number of subjects who responded positively.

Therefore, the given graph deceives the readers.