In more than two decades designing charts and teaching how to make them I’ve realized that becoming a good graphics reader doesn’t just depend on understanding their symbols and grammar. It also requires grasping the power and limitations of the numbers they depict and being mindful of how our brains deceive themselves below our awareness. Numerical literacy (numeracy) and graphical literacy (graphicacy) are connected, and they are inseparable from psychological literacy, for which we lack a good name.
If How Charts Lie has gotten you interested in numeracy, graphicacy, and the limitations of human reasoning, here are some readings that are natural follow-ups.
Books about reasoning:
•Tavris, Carol, and Elliot Aronson. Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007.
•Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Vintage Books, 2012.
•Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
Books about numeracy:
•Goldacre, Ben. Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
•Wheelan, Charles. Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
•Ellenberg, Jordan. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
•Silver, Nate. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—but Some Don’t. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.
Books about charts:
•Wainer, Howard. Visual Revelations: Graphical Tales of Fate and Deception From Napoleon Bonaparte To Ross Perot. London, UK: Psychology Press, 2000.
Wainer has many other relevant books, and has written extensively about how charts mislead us.
•Meirelles, Isabel. Design for Information: An Introduction to the Histories, Theories, and Best Practices behind Effective Information Visualizations. Beverly, MA: Rockport Publishers, 2013.
•Nussbaumer Knaflic, Cole. Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2015.
•Monmonier, Mark. How to Lie with Maps. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.
•Few, Stephen. Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten. 2nd ed. El Dorado Hills, CA: Analytics Press, 2012.
Books about the ethics of data:
•O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Broadway Books, 2016.
•Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.
•Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.
Finally, if you want to learn more about the charts that appear in this book, visit http://www.howchartslie.com.