“Who made this? Yes, I’m asking the source. I have to know, I have to know.”
This was the first thing Luke said after he saw a graph on rising oil prices titled, “Biden Gas Price Surge.” From that moment, he questioned every aspect of the graph for the next two hours—the source, the timeline, the other relevant events that could explain the oil price surge, and even the intent of the designer. He was skeptical about the information presented, asked critical questions, and eventually succeeded in identifying real inconsistencies in the graph.
The experience was quite different for Lara. When shown the same graph and asked, “Do you think the graph is telling the appropriate story?,” she acknowledged having been exposed to a similar political narrative in her hometown, and agreed with the narrative of the graph.
Source: Fox News
Visualization by: Debasmita Base using Claude
I am not here to judge whether either student’s understanding of the complicated issue of the government’s role in controlling gas prices was accurate. That was not my focus. I was struck by something else entirely—how their different prior beliefs shaped not just what they took away from the graph, but how they approached the graph in the first place.
One student spent two hours interrogating every design choice. The other recognized the narrative as familiar and moved on. Same graph. Opposite responses. And in both instances, I would argue, expressions of an underlying bias.
Right for the wrong reasons
I have been teaching mathematics for over a decade—first in high schools in India, and now at the college level in New York City. I have spent years teaching students how to draw graphs, how to read the coordinates of points, and how to make sense of numbers. I thought that was the job: to build the skills, prepare students to be an active part of society, and how to be informed citizens. Luke and Lara taught me otherwise.
In my research studying how college students interpret misleading political graphs, I conducted individual clinical interviews where I asked them prompting questions as they worked through graphs on topics such as immigration, inflation, government policy. What I found over and over again was that prior beliefs did not just shape what students concluded—these prior beliefs dictated the students’ approach to interpreting graphs in the first place. Prior beliefs shaped how hard they looked, where they directed their skepticism, and how much doubt they were willing to tolerate before settling into a reading.
Lara’s knowledge about the government’s role in controlling gas prices was primarily experiential; she believed the government controls the price of gas, “to keep up with cost and production.” So in her approach to interpretation of the graph, she did not question any component of the graph—rather, she accepted the narrative as it was.
Luke’s analysis was more rigorous. From the very beginning, he rejected the idea of blaming only the President for the rising price of gas, and asked many thought-provoking, critical questions, as he thoroughly scrutinized the graph. He showed skepticism towards the graph’s designer, questioning their intentions and wondering if they were attempting to establish a causal relationship between President Joe Biden’s inauguration and gas price increases. This led Luke to dismiss the graph. In other words, he showed every trait of an engaged and aware critical thinker.
But I couldn’t shake a core question: If the graph’s narrative was aligned with Luke’s beliefs, would he still exhibit a similar level of critical engagement?
Luke’s approach is what researchers call, “motivated skepticism.” Motivation skepticism is the deployment of critical thinking not as a neutral tool, but as a mechanism to defend prior beliefs.
It is confirmation bias running in reverse—not the blind acceptance of comfortable information, but the sharp interrogation of uncomfortable information. Motivated skepticism is an attempt to protect what we already believe from disruption.
Both Lara and Luke exhibited confirmation bias and motivated skepticism. In my research studying college students, I found both patterns to be consistently present—often in the same classroom—and sometimes in the same student across different topics. Critical thinking is real in both cases. What shifts is where it gets aimed.
The wrong kind of literacy
For decades, mathematics and statistics teachers have taught graphs using a traditional approach: teach students about axes and scaling, tell them to identify coordinates of points and measure heights of bars. The lessons are clean and measurable, but almost entirely disconnected from the world outside the classroom. Graphs about hypothetical test scores, or the cost of watermelon dominated textbooks. The contents were safe and sanitized of anything that might provoke a real opinion.
But with time, researchers pushed back, citing the gaps between the graphs students found in their school textbooks and what they encountered in life outside of schools. Curricula adjusted. Contents became more authentic. Real data crept in. We were pleased with this approach. We hoped students’ performance in graph literacy would improve. And with such an approach, we are preparing our students to become independent thinkers who are capable of thoroughly scrutinizing graphical data, and asking critical questions. However, what we missed was simpler and more unsettling. Even if students have the graph literacy, do they apply those skills equally for every graph they encounter? Probably not.
In my research, Luke could identify every flaw in the graph on gas price increases. He asked critical questions and challenged the designer of the graph for presenting a narrative that Luke believed to be misleading. But his scrutiny was not just the product of his education. It was the product of his political beliefs. His critical thinking was already deployed, waiting, aimed in a specific direction before even interpreting the graph. The title of the graph, “Biden Gas Price Surge,” prompted him to criticize the graph as soon as he saw it.
On the other hand, Lara’s acceptance was not ignorance. She understood the graph perfectly, and agreed that it was biased. She simply did not see a reason to question it.
This is the crisis we are not talking about. We have spent years teaching students how to read graphs. However, we have spent almost no time teaching them to ask when they choose to read graphs critically, and when they don’t. That second question is harder, more uncomfortable, and far more important—because a student who can identify a misleading graph only when it contradicts their beliefs is not a critical thinker. They are sophisticated defenders of their own worldview. And our curriculum, focused entirely on technical decoding, has handed students a sharper sword without ever asking them where they point it.
The problem is not that our students lack skills. The problem is that we have confused skill with disposition. Graph literacy, as we have taught it, assumes a neutral reader approaching a neutral object. But neither the reader, nor the graph, is ever neutral. Every graph carries an argument. Every reader carries a history. And the meeting point between the two is precisely where our teaching has been silent.
Debasmita Basu
Debasmita Basu is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education and Director of the Quantitative Reasoning Program at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, where she teaches quantitative reasoning and social justice mathematics. Her research examines how students engage with misleading data visualizations, with a focus on confirmation bias and critical statistical literacy.
