Seeing Identity in Data: Can Anthropographics Uncover Racial Homophily in Emotional Responses?
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Date
2025
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association
Abstract
Racial homophily refers to the tendency of individuals to associate with others of the same racial or ethnic background. A recent study found no evidence of racial homophily in responses to mass shooting data visualizations. To increase the likelihood of detecting an effect, we redesigned the experiment by replacing bar charts with anthropographics and expanding the sample size. In a crowdsourced study (N=720), we showed participants a pictograph of mass shooting victims in the United States, with victims from one of three racial groups (Hispanic, Black, or White) highlighted. Each participant was assigned a visualization highlighting either their own racial group or a different racial group, allowing us to assess the influence of racial concordance on changes in affect (emotion). We found that, across all conditions, racial concordance had a modest but significant effect on changes in affect, with participants experiencing greater negative affect change when viewing visualizations highlighting their own race. This study provides initial evidence that racial homophily can emerge in responses to data visualizations, particularly when using anthropographics.
Description
CCS Concepts: Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in visualization
@inproceedings{10.2312:evs.20251078,
booktitle = {EuroVis 2025 - Short Papers},
editor = {El-Assady, Mennatallah and Ottley, Alvitta and Tominski, Christian},
title = {{Seeing Identity in Data: Can Anthropographics Uncover Racial Homophily in Emotional Responses?}},
author = {Sukumar, Poorna Talkad and Porfiri, Maurizio and Nov, Oded},
year = {2025},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISBN = {978-3-03868-282-0},
DOI = {10.2312/evs.20251078}
}