>> If you look at the graphics on the previous pages, you might think: The “Financial Times” graphic looks “professional”, perhaps even “scientific”, but in any case “helpful” because it reflects the contents of the “Financial Times”. Winton graphics combined and presented in a comparative manner. However, this is a fallacy that many in Germany fall into who make risk communication and for whom it is made: these are the institutions that support politics, political decision-makers, implementers and mediators of decisions, the media and, ultimately, the citizens. The media in particular often report numbers without questioning them and often comment on them in shortened ways, very often skewed and without context. This is the poor risk communication we experience far too often. This leads to wrong conclusions, unnecessary fears and overall reduces the ability to correctly assess risks.

The presentations by the “Winton Center for Risk and Evidence Communication” at the University of Cambridge under the direction of Prof. Dr. show, for example, that there is another way. Sir David Spiegelhalter. The graphics developed there take into account the fact, known from psychology, that we can better perceive and assess risks when absolute values are given, not relative ones, such as percentages. Risk communication with absolute numbers is much easier to understand because the basic risk is also communicated and it is easier to compare your own risk with the average risk. Relative information can easily lead to incorrect judgments. Just like the often stated and only apparently easy to understand relative effectiveness and incidence.

A well-known example: If there is a risk that 2 out of 100 people will suffer damage, and with new measures only 1 out of 100 people will suffer the damage, the absolute reduction in risk is 1 in 100. However, the relative risk reduction is 50%. These 50% appear to be a huge improvement and lead to largely unfounded hopes or, in the opposite case, fears. Things get particularly bad when the benefits of measures are expressed in terms of relative risks, but harm is expressed in terms of absolute risks. Things get even worse if relative figures are used for further calculations. The graphics that the “Winton Center for Risk and Evidence Communication” develops and publishes are currently significantly better. They help to actually understand and assess risks better.

What Winton is to Britain, the Harding Center is to
Risk competence of the University of Potsdam for Germany. “We want to investigate how people behave in risky situations. With our work we can make a contribution to this.” This is what Prof. Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and current director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, which was founded at the beginning of 2020 and is affiliated with the Max Planck Society. The proximity is no coincidence, but is due to the person of the founder: David Harding is director of Winton Capital, one of the ten largest investment companies in Great Britain, which established an endowed professorship for “Public Understanding of Risk” in 2007 “ at the University of Cambridge.

Both institutions work with many publications for “a society that knows how to assess risks and live with them” (Gigerenzer). A prime example of the work done here are various “fact boxes” that are intended to help “weigh the benefits and harms of a vaccination against Covid-19”. Of course, this is always in an effort to not only present the best available evidence on the potential benefits and harms of various medical measures or health topics - and in a graphic form that promotes understanding. The “fact boxes” build on the developments and findings of the Harding Center’s research into transparent communication of risks through the use of natural numbers and frequencies, which the Winton Center also uses. The fact boxes are also scientifically evaluated with regard to the effectiveness of conveying patient-relevant knowledge and health decisions. It also examines which formats are suitable for summarizing and presenting medical evidence and how best to communicate information about quality and uncertainty. In this way, the health literacy of the population is actually improved.

This is the right approach and we hope it will achieve a breakthrough wherever risk communication is involved. Not that something like this doesn't exist yet: Such "fact boxes" on various medical topics from "acute bronchitis" to "premature rupture of the membranes" and also on Covid-19 (in cooperation with the RKI) are available on the portals, for example the AOK Federal Association and the AOK Nordost as well as the “Weissen Liste” (Bertelsmann Foundation), the Robert Koch Institute and GWQ ServicePlus AG (a service company for health insurance companies). It would be nice if these examples set a precedent and in the future there would no longer be attempts to communicate politics with difficult-to-understand number games.

This wish is also supported by a campaign that Gerd Gigerenzer, the Bochum economist Thomas Bauer and the Dortmund statistician Walter Krämer launched in 2012: the “Unstatistics of the Month”. Here, both recently published figures and their interpretations are questioned and commented on every month. According to the initiators, this is with the aim of “correctly interpreting numerical images of reality and describing an increasingly complex world and environment more meaningfully”. <<

https://wintoncentre.maths.cam.ac.uk/projects/press-alert/
https://www.hardingcenter.de/de
https://www.hardingcenter.de/de/transfer-und-nutzen/faktenboxen
https://www.rwi-essen.de/unstatistik/