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Decision-making: Risk school

Nature volume 461, pages 1189–1192 (2009)Cite this article

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.

A group of eight-year-olds sits around a classroom table, playing with coloured, plastic boxes called tinker-cubes and linking them into chains. It could be playtime at almost any primary school in the world. But in this classroom, located in Stuttgart, Germany, the 'toys' are actually giving the children their first lesson in probabilistic reasoning. The cubes represent the children's attributes — red cubes for girls, blue for boys; a yellow cube attached to a red cube for a girl with glasses, a green cube attached to a blue for a boy without glasses. The students end up with a symbolic representation of their classmates as a group. And by collecting the cubes in various bins — boys versus girls, glasses versus non-glasses and so on — they begin to get a feel for the probability that, say, a boy will wear glasses or that a girl will not. It is play that is not quite play — yet the children seem hooked.

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Authors
  1. Michael Bond
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Additional information

Michael Bond is a freelance writer based in London.

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Harding Center for Risk Literacy

Decision Research

Elke Kurz-Milcke

Nudge website

Shane Frederick

Richard Nisbett

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Bond, M. Decision-making: Risk school. Nature 461, 1189–1192 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/4611189a

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