The New York Times published an article today on the difficulties patients have in making appropriate decisions about their medical care: In Medicine, Acceptable Risk Is in the Eye of the Beholder. It is very hard for people to understand the risks associated with medical treatments, because as humans we are particularly averse to risk when it comes to potential losses to our personal situation. What can be more personal than one's health? And as the article discusses, patients frequently make sub-optimal decisions for themselves because of this aversion.

To read more about this “irrational” behavior, start by looking into prospect theory, a seminal idea from the field of behavioral economics, developed by Kahneman & Tversky.

This article stands out for me though because it explains how visualizations of the risks can dramatically help patients understand the issues more completely. I am very interested in this integration of visualization & decision-making and would like to see more systematic analysis of why different visualizations lead to different conclusions.

From the NYTimes:

In a paper published in the June issue of PLoS Medicine, Dr. Jerome R. Hoffman says using illustrations is helpful. Pie charts, dartboards and, best of all, roulette wheels, he suggests, communicate the complex information about the probability of a good outcome more understandably.

My question is why are roulette wheels the best visualizations? Is it because, on average, patients are most familiar with the concept of risk from gambling with roulette wheels? Does that mean you should get a visualization tailored to your personal life experiences? Nerds get pie charts, barflies get dartboards, and gamblers get roulette wheels? Or is there something inherent in our visual analysis that is universal for all types of people, making roulette wheel visualizations easier to analyze than the other representations?