Ethical Awareness Training for Ethical Decision-Making by Future Producers of Infographic Data Visualisations

The infographic producer needs to keep the user in mind when creating infographics, as any misleading information can be unethical and affect users’ decision-making. In our study, we provided ethical awareness training to data science students on five ethical principles adapted from the AI4People framework for contemplating and applying these principles to infographic scenarios with ethical dilemmas tied to each ethical principle. We measured students' ethical sensitivity using two infographics during the pre-training and two in the post-training. The McNemar test showed statistically significant (p<0.05) results for pre-training infographics 1 and 2 compared with post-training infographic 1. Pre-training infographic 1 was statistically significant in the opposite direction compared with post-training infographic 2 and was not statistically significantly different between pre-training infographic 2 and post-training infographic 2, possibly due to fatigue. From our findings, we infer that ethical training was beneficial for infographics with fewer data visualisations and narratives.