User:Astrid Kause/sandbox

Risk literacy is the ability to accurately interpret everyday risks and uncertainties and to come to unbiased and informed decisions based on that information (Gigerenzer, 2011; Cokely et al., 2012). Being risk literate enables individuals to dealing with a modern and technological society, where not all probabilities and outcomes of events are known but where uncertainty is an inherent part of the individuals’ environment (Gigerenzer, 2014). It is assumed that beyond the insight that our world is not certain (Gigerenzer, 2011), three skills are essential for dealing with such a world: Firstly, numeracy and statistical thinking, that is the basic ability to deal with numerical information about risks and uncertainties (Gigerenzer, 2014; 2011), secondly decision-making based on so-called heuristics, rules of thumb, that lead to sufficiently good decisions in uncertain environments, and thirdly, an understanding of the psychology of risk, that is of the social and emotional reactions of individuals and groups influencing perception and reactions towards risk and uncertainty (Gigerenzer, 2014).

Other definitions of risk literacy are more narrow in that they merely refer to the correct understanding of statistical probabilities about risks as well as probabilistic reasoning. This is assumed as a precondition for decision-making under risk and differentiated from so-called risk awareness and risk knowledge, that is factual information about risks (Cokely et al., 2012). As coined as early as 1903 by the biologist and writer Herbert G. Wells in his book Mankind in the Making (1903) in an industrialized world “it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write.“ (p?)