An almost 50 page scientific article was published last month that looks at the impact of images, on financial investment decisions. A quote from the article:

We demonstrate that positive images significantly increase and negative images significantly decrease investment, despite the fact that the images do not provide additional information relevant to the investment tasks and should be disregarded by rational investors.

It all seem statistically relevant and scientifically sound.

It makes intuitive sense as well. A boring presentation without any images is not very effective. But people sometimes ignore the ‘mood’ of an image. Even if the visualisation of a concept is perfect, but you picked an image that is ugly, scary, gross, its visual impact will be the opposite of what you want it be.

Does this mean that you should plaster an financial presentation with meaningless pictures of rainbows? Probably not, everything in moderation.

See the results of the study here.