Risk Literacy and Health

Gerd Gigerenzer, Harding Center for Risk Literacy, University of Potsdam

Efficient and affordable health care requires both informed patients and doctors. Yet studies show that most doctors do not understand health statistics. Health organizations and industries exploit this innumeracy to make small benefits of treatments or screenings appear big and their harms appear small. I will talk about techniques for helping doctors and patients make sense of medical evidence. Promoting risk literacy in health could save more lives than expensive screening programs and Big Data.

Speaker biosketch

Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam. He former director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich, former professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor, School of Law at the University of Virginia. Gigerenzer was educated and earned his doctoral degree in psychology at LMU Munich. He is a fellow of the German Academy of Sciences, the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the Cognitive Science Society and the Association for Psychological Science, and a member of the Scientific Council of the European Research Council. He is a recipient of the Allais Memorial Prize in Behavioral Sciences, the Henry Walton Prize of the Association for the Study of Medical Education, the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences, the Association of American Publishers Prize for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences, the Hufeland Award from the German Foundation for General Medicine (Stiftung Allgemeinmedizin) for improving knowledge and transparency in medicine, and was named one of the top 100 Global Thought Leaders by the Gottfried Duttweiler Institute. He is an honorary professor at the University of Potsdam, Humboldt-Universität Berlin.