The top dog among jealous dogs

Is data visualization worth paying for? In some quarters, this may be a controversial question.

If you are having doubts, just look at some examples of great visualization. This week, the NYT team brings us a wonderful example. The story is about whether dogs feel jealousy. Researchers have dog owners play with (a) a stuffed toy shaped like a dog (b) a Jack-o-lantern and (c) a book; and they measured several behavior that are suggestive of jealousy, such as barking or pushing/touching the owner. 

This is how the researchers presented their findings in PLOS:

And this is how the same chart showed up in NYT:

Same data. Same grouped column format. Completely different effect on the readers.

Let's see what the NYT team did to the original, roughly in order of impact:

• Added a line above the legend, explaining that the colors represent different experimental conditions
• Re-ordered the behavior by their average prevalence from left to right
• Added little cartoons to make the chart more fun to look at
• Added colors and removed moire patterns (a Tufte pet peeve)
• Changed the vertical scale from 0 to 1 (scientific) to 0-100
• Reduced the number of tick marks on the vertical scale (this is smart because the researchers observed only about 30 dogs so only very large differences are of practical value)
• Clarified certain category details, e.g. Snapping became "bite or snap at object"
• Removed technical details of p-values, not important to NYT readers

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Even simple charts illustrating simple data can be done well or done poorly.