How to Lie with Charts

Master the art of reading and creating honest business graphics in an era of dashboards, big data, and misinformation.In How to Lie with Charts, business communicator and graphics expert Gerald Everett Jones takes readers on a revealing journey through the world of business graphics, exposing how charts, graphs, dashboards, and visual reports can unintentionally-or deliberately-distort reality. Drawing on decades of experience in business communications and data visualization, Jones demonstrates that the greatest threat to informed decision-making is often not bad data, but the misleading ways data is presented. From boardrooms to classrooms, investors to managers, anyone who relies on charts to communicate or interpret information is vulnerable to being misled.A Supplementary Courseware Textbook in Graph Design, Business Math, and MarketingThe book begins with a deceptively simple premise: numbers alone do not tell the truth. Every chart represents a process of reducing, summarizing, and interpreting data, and every design choice carries the potential to influence perception. Through engaging examples and practical illustrations, readers discover how averages, summaries, categories, labels, and data selections can subtly alter conclusions before a chart is ever created. What appears objective on the surface often reflects assumptions, biases, and hidden decisions beneath the data.As the narrative unfolds, Jones guides readers through the most common chart types-including pie charts, line graphs, radar charts, dashboards, and financial reports-showing how scale manipulation, orientation, labeling, color, trend lines, and visual emphasis can dramatically change the message received by an audience. Each chapter uncovers specific techniques that can exaggerate, conceal, confuse, or persuade, while simultaneously teaching readers how to recognize and avoid those same traps in their own work.The fourth edition expands the conversation beyond traditional business presentations into modern challenges such as social media misinformation, metadata analysis, dashboards, technical analysis, and financial reporting. In an age where visual information spreads faster than ever, the book serves as both a warning and a practical guide. Rather than teaching deception, it empowers readers to become more critical consumers and more ethical creators of visual information. By understanding how charts can be manipulated, readers learn to communicate with greater clarity, spot misleading presentations, and make better decisions based on the evidence before them.2020 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist in BusinessPreviously adopted as supplementary courseware at universities such as Georgetown Public Policy Institute and Empire State.This is the fourth edition of the definitive textbook on data visualization. There’s added material on fake news and social media disinformation, misinterpretation of metadata, and the uses and abuses of Big Data.If you’re using a computer to generate charts for meetings and reports, you don’t have to be taught how to lie - you’re already doing it. You probably don’t know your charts are unreliable, and neither does your audience. So you’re getting away with it - until a manager or a sales prospect or an investor makes a bad decision based on the information that you were so helpful to provide. The main focus of How to Lie with Charts is on the principles of persuasive - and undistorted - visual communication. It’s about careful thinking and clear expression. 6