62 Kellogg Insight 3. Visualizations are uniquely persuasive. Research on visualizations supports the idea that they can be perversely persuasive. This is because we are much more likely to believe conclu - sions if they’re visualized than if they are just given in numbers. Franconeri describes a study where participants were told about a trend in data—either a military-troop surge, a change in unemployment num - bers, or a trend in climate-change data—with verbal descriptions of the change in these numbers. “Then you give the people the information in one of two forms: just that text or text accompanied by a graph,” he says. People were much more likely to report believing the trends in the graphical formats. “Something happens in your brain when you get the visualization; infor - mation sinks in more deeply and is far more difficult to ignore,” says Franconeri. 4. Visualizations are powerful—but they can also be powerfully misleading. Still, visualizations do require time and effort to understand. “When you look at a picture, you recognize objects, faces, or Pokémon within 150 milliseconds. That’s half the duration of your fastest eyeblink. Visualizations don’t work like that—they need to be read . Understanding patterns in data isn’t like recognizing a picture; it’s like reading a para - graph,” says Franconeri. Based on insights from Steve Franconeri