Earlier this week, Hans Rosling a pioneer and one of the leading members in the visualization domain passed away. Hans gave a TED talk in February 2006 and while Hans goes on to talk about how there is a need for the public and private statistical data to be made available to people that need it, the most important take away that I got from his presentation was that society as a whole is more interested in looking at the data from the top most level. We see the world as us against everyone else and countries as first world and third world. People in society never really look and try to understand the data as what it really is about, but instead sees it as what it is shown to us. For example, Hans does a comparison between GBP of countries in the world vs the Child Survival rate. The sub-Saharan region of Africa has the lowest GDP vs Child Survival rates in his data set. If you were to look into the data then you would notice that while the average value is the lowest, the countries that are part of the sub-Saharan region is actually evenly spaced out. Mauritius actually has better statistical value than the average of Latin America. No one would know to look at Mauritius to see why their GBP is so high in the area, but instead they would look and see that the sub-Saharan region has one of the lowest GBP vs Child Survival rates in the world.
Reference: https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen