The risk- approach is gaining prominence as a mechanism to address societal questions. Although the merits of the concept are well understood in academic circles, popular readings of the term still see risks as problems, to be avoided at (almost) all cost. This hinders the development of the full problem solving capacity of the risk-concept in decision making settings.
We address this problem by giving children, whom we postulate have not been framed to view risk as a purely negative thing, but who are increasingly exposed to negatively framed information about risks in the media, the thinking tools to help them gain an understanding of the nature and benefits of the risk-concept.
We teach them how they can optimalise their own decisionmaking using the concept of risk (a collection of possible outcomes) as a way to make their own risk-risk trade-offs. To this end we offer them elementary information about probability and uncertainty, and emphasise that conditions of uncertainty are not necessarily ‘’bad‘’ but rather indications of multiple possible outcomes in which unwanted outcomes can be reduced but at a cost.
A special element of our lessons centres on the physical sensations children experience whenever they encounter something scary. We hypothesise that bodily sensations are influential in steering the childrens’ decisions in risky decisions, and are in fact dominant over cognitive imput. We want therefore to make them aware of the sinking feeling in their stomachs whenever they encounter abstract information because this sinking feeling is then actually misapplied.
We have so far chosen to use a specific type of risk: accidents involving hazardous substances, because the risks of this type are usually quite small and therefore offer a good playground for uninitiated minds.
Resting on the sound intellectual pillars developed by scholars like Daniel Kahneman, Baruch Fischhoff, Ortwin Renn and Ragnar Löfstedt (who are on our scientific advisory board), we have developed an inductive pilot to test different games and interventions for their effectiveness. The pilots have so far yielded positive qualitative results.
We would like to discuss the results of our pilot and explore possibilities for using this kind of playful interaction with children and young adults to help them gain an understanding of valuable ways of organising complex information in a society that is paradoxically getting both ever more risk-driven as risk-averse.