RISK SCHOOL
Can the general public learn to evaluate risks accurately, or do authorities need to steer it towards correct decisions? Michael Bond talks to the two opposing camps.

Abstract
"In most parts of the world, children are taught the mathematics of certainty, not of uncertainty."
Gerd Gigerenzer

[...] Teaching schoolchildren how to deal with frequencies and probabilities helps to prepare them for the complexities and uncertainties of the modern world, and will help them make sound decisions throughout their lives.
That's a view strongly endorsed by Gerd Gigerenzer, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and a frequent collaborator with Kurz-Milcke. "At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nearly everyone living in an industrial society had been taught reading and writing but not how to understand information about risks and uncertainties in our technological world," he says. Earlier this year, Gigerenzer set up the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute to try to remedy this situation. Funded for an initial five or six years by a €1.5-million (US$2.2-million) grant from David Harding, managing director of the London-based investment-banking firm Winton Capital and a teacher of risk communication at the University of Cambridge, UK, Gigerenzer and his team of five scientists have a twofold aim. First is to do basic research on how people perceive risk and second is to improve people's statistical and decision-making skills through education programmes. [...]

Article
Published online 28 October 2009 | Nature 461, 1189-1192 (2009) | doi:10.1038/4611189a