If you'll indulge me some just-so-story type speculation, I suspect the reason striking visuals are more persuasive then words is that we evolved to expect others to manipulate us through language, we didn't evolve to expect to be manipulated through visuals.
That's a really interesting hypothesis. I would have guessed that it is just due to humans being very visual beings. I'd be really interested in seeing a way of testing your hypothesis. Another alternative hypothesis- people are more likely to dismiss simple assertions but graphs signal that someone has spent time and effort thinking about the issue in question. Moreover, knowing how to make a graph signals minimal intelligence so people are more likely to give credence?
Perhaps; on the other hand, this strikes me as a mild form of the infamous love-bombing technique.
That seems disconnected. Love-bombing involves making a set of emotional connections to the claims or people in question. This doesn't connect the emotion to the claims that are then evaluated later.
I would have guessed that it is just due to humans being very visual beings.
The paper briefly considers whether the effect is due to graphs being easier to process, but apparently not (p.32):
...These results do not appear to be driven by systematic differences how respondents processed Text or Graph – a post-treatment check of recall of a primary data source (NASA) found few significant differences between the treatments. Moreover, we observe no significant difference in the length of time respondents spent considering each treatment. These results sugge
This is a remarkable article. Is there a way to use this to overcome others' bias that passes ethical muster as not dark arts?
(HT +Tony Sidaway on G+.)