1.1 Making Keen Observations

Topic Summary

Before you dive into your data, or even think about how to use it to answer your questions, it helps to stop and consider the way you observe the world around you. A couple points become clear: first, that you have amazing powers of observation. You take in information using your five senses, and you form conclusions about your world that help you accomplish great things. Second, however, it soon becomes obvious that your brain is susceptible to illusions and cognitive biases of various kinds. That’s true for everyone. We’re not perfect observers, by any means. In this first lesson, you’ll come face to face with your amazing and flawed powers of observation, and you’ll receive some tips to cut through the clutter and make even more keen observations going forward.

Where are You in the Flowchart?

1.1 Making Keen Observations | Data Literacy | Data Literacy  

Key Points To Remember

  • We all have amazing powers of observation, but they are far from perfect and highly susceptible to flaws and biases of various kinds.
  • To work with data, we need to learn how to keenly observe the data itself, the world around us, and ourselves.

6 Sound Principles of Observation:

  1. Get close to the SOURCE of the data
  2. Slow down, breathe, and be MINDFUL
  3. Minimize distractions & FOCUS
  4. Look at it from multiple PERSPECTIVES
  5. Write down your thoughts in a JOURNAL
  6. Be aware of cognitive fallacies & BIASES

Definitions

  • incongruity – a violation of our perceptual expectations
  • inattentional blindness – (also called ‘perceptual blindness’) “occurs when an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, purely as a result of a lack of attention rather than any vision defects or deficits.” (Source: Wikipedia, accessed 07 June 2022)
  • survivorship bias – “the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to incorrect conclusions.” (Source: Wikipedia, accessed 07 June 2022)
  • confirmation bias – “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.” (Source: Wikipedia, accessed 07 June 2022)
  • surrogation – in data, this happens whenever a person loses sight of something important by focusing too much on a metric that imperfectly represents it.

Diagrams

Five Playing Cards. A 3 of spades, 4 of diamonds, 5 of spades, 6 of hearts, and 7 of clubs. Used to illustrate that we can quickly add up the numbers and find the square root, but we also might miss an "incongruity" that's right in front of our eyes.
5 Playing Cards find the square root of the sum of the values of the cards
A diagram by Tamara Munzner that shows Expressiveness Types and Effectiveness Ranks of different visual encoding channels such as position, length, and color. The magnitude channels on the left express ordered attributes. The identity channels on the right express unordered, categorical attributes. The channels are ordered from top to bottom by most effective to least effective. The ordered attributes on the left from most to least effective are position on a common scale, position on unaligned scale, length (1D size), Tilt/angle, Area (2D size), Depth (3D position), color luminance, color saturation, curvature, and volume (3D size). The categorical attributes on the right from most to least effective are spatial region, color hue, motion, and shape.
Visualization Analysis and Design Tamara Munzner with illustrations by Eamonn Maguire A K Peters Visualization Series CRC Press 2014
An example of survivorship bias. A graphical depiction of a military aircraft with red dots for bullet strikes, an image of the first page of a report on how to estimate vulnerability, and a headshot of the report's author, Abraham Wald.
McGeddon CC BY SA 40 via Wikimedia Commons httpscommonswikimediaorgwikiFileSurvivorship biaspng
The Cognitive Bias Codex, a visual tool that organizes biases in a meaningful way. The graphic is structured as a circle with four quadrants categorizing the 180+ cognitive biases into four categories: Too Much Information, Not Enough Meaning, Need to Act Fast, and What Should We Remember? The visual underscores how commonly our thinking fails us, and a result, where we might begin to improve.
design John Manoogian III categories and descriptions Buster Benson implementation TilmannR CC BY SA 40 via Wikimedia Commons

Course Project

Choose a topic of interest in your life for which you want to use data to learn or improve in some way. The topic of interest can come from any of the “3 Domains of Application” covered in the Data Literacy Fundamentals course – namely, professional, personal, or public.

  • What are some of your key observations about this topic?
    • What’s the source of your observations?
  • What do you observe about yourself relative to this topic?
    • What are your positive emotions (hopes, aspirations, joys, etc.) about it?
    • What are your negative emotions (fears, concerns, woes, etc.) about it?
    • What cognitive biases or perceptual limitations might be influencing you?

Quotes

“Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.“

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book III, 11

“You’re not going to develop a discerning eye unless you hone your ability to give something your full and undivided attention.“

Daido Moriyama

“Learn to see details. There is quite a difference between simply looking at a chart and seeing it. Looking is your first visual impression, while seeing involves the studying of distinct parts of the visual.“

Mary Eleanor Spear,

Further Learning

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