A poll taken after the 2016 presidential election found, for instance, that more than half of people who voted for Donald Trump incorrectly believed that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Ten years earlier, a Scripps Howard/Ohio University survey found that just over half of Democrats wouldn't rule out the possibility that “people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted [the] United States to go to war in the Middle East.”

How do you combat misperceptions like these? That's the subject of a new paper published in the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties by Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College and Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter.

Through survey experiments, Nyhan and Reifler arrived at a surprising answer: charts. “We find that providing participants with graphical information significantly decreases false and unsupported factual beliefs.” Crucially, they show that data presented in graphs and illustrations does a better job of fighting misperceptions than the same information presented in text form.