I am not trying to apply a “critical thinking guideline” I saw elsewhere. I’ve not taken any “critical thinking classes”. I’m more insulted that you think I couldn’t have possibly just thought of that comment myself. It’s not a particularly crazy comment to make, and I don’t see why any individual who knows how to read graphs couldn’t just happen to make that comment.
Anyway—sure, I never said the graph lied. Perhaps a better wording would be that, regardless of how the information is presented, I don’t think the difference in magnitude between people’s happiness ratings (ignoring the issues with how those ratings were collected and ascertained in the first place) is significant or particularly of note. The Y-axis is chosen so as to visually amplify this difference. I didn’t claim the data presented by the graph was untrue or that reading the graph correctly was too difficult if one wanted to read it properly.