“Our aim is to study how people behave in risk situations. We believe that our work can contribute towards the ideal of a society that knows how to calculate risks and live with them.”
(Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of the Harding Center)
Should I have a flu vaccination or not? Is it safer to travel by car or by plane? Can early-detection screening tests for cancer prolong my life? Questions like these are the research focus of our team of scientists led by Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Center.
Gerd Gigerenzer is the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and author of numerous books, including “Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious” and “Calculated Risks: How to Know When Numbers Deceive You”.
Our goal is to help people in their struggle to understand and assess the risks facing them. Our primary focus is on health and medicine as well as on educating people from childhood onwards to understand statistics. By conducting studies, experiments, and surveys, we investigate people’s problems with understanding numbers and find solutions to these. We also offer special training seminars for physicians and journalists, who need to know how to interpret and communicate risks to their patients and the general public.
The Harding Center for Risk Competence as a project has been part of the Faculty of Health Sciences since 1st January 2020. The center’s staff research, develop and publish methods and instruments that enable the public and experts to make risk-competent decisions in an increasingly digitised everyday life. The aim is for a society that understands risks and can live with uncertainty.
The center’s research stands for information, for presenting facts in a commonly understandable form, and for developing analogue and digital tools that help people to make informed and efficient health and consumer decisions.
You can find more information on the Harding Center website.
