"Risk literacy" and social cleavages: Vulnerability in three acts

Although recent studies show widening socio-economic divisions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many such divisions were already identified as social cleavages. Scholars and observers tend to view the world in a dichotomous manner, overgeneralising their analyses along known cleavages. Therefore, the relevance of our work as scholars is at risk and we, the scholars of the contemporary world, are “vulnerable” to the temptation of ignoring the details, nuances, and complexities. The uneven impact of and recovery from the pandemic is not necessarily binary – for example, a refusal to follow the medical consensus (e.g. social distancing, vaccination) can be observed on both sides of many cleavages. Against such a background, this paper first characterises the pandemic as a medical, socio-economic, and information crisis. With the former two “pillars” resembling the known cleavages, the third pillar goes beyond the physical access to information and deals with the people’s perception of various risks. Such a behavioural angle to the vulnerability – labelled “risk literacy” – highlights the phenomenon of “digital divide” and shows a promising feature as an additional analytical tool. By familiarising ourselves with the people’s varying risk perceptions, we increase our own literacy against the risk of overgeneralisation.

Comparing Three Countries’ Higher Education Students’ Cyber Related Perceptions and Behaviours during COVID-19

In 2020, a global pandemic led to lockdowns, and subsequent social and business restrictions. These required overnight implementation of emergency measures to permit continued functioning of vital industries. Digital technologies and platforms made this switch feasible, but it also introduced several cyber related vulnerabilities, which students might not have known how to mitigate. For this study, the Global Cyber Security Index and the Cyber Risk literacy and education index were used to provide a cyber security context for each country. This research project—an international, cross-university, comparative, quantitative project—aimed to explore the risk attitudes and concerns, as well as protective behaviours adopted by, students at a South African, a Welsh and a Hungarian University, during the pandemic. This study’s findings align with the relative rankings of the Oliver Wyman Risk Literacy and Education Index for the countries in which the universities reside. This study revealed significant differences between the student behaviours of students within these universities. The most important differences were identified between students’ risk attitudes and concerns. It was also discovered that South African students reported having changed their protective online behaviours to the greatest extent, since the pandemic commenced. Recommendations are made suggesting that cyber security training and education, as well as improving the digital trust and confidence in digital platforms, are critical.

Contribution of Risk Perception and Communication in Aviation Safety Events

Although effective risk management during operations relies on risk perception and risk communication, the aviation industry has not systematically considered the contribution of these two constructs to safety events. This study analyzed a representative sample of safety investigation reports (1) to identify the degree to which risk perception and communication and their factors have been influential overall and across various flight operation stages of investigated events, and (2) to examine whether their contribution has changed with time. The analysis of 140 reports showed environmental factors affected risk communication and perception most frequently, whereas emotional and physiological factors were found in the sample with very low frequencies. Also, risk communication and perception and their factors did not appear with the same frequency across the various flight stages, and a few variations were observed over time. The aviation industry could consider the results of this study to steer its efforts toward mitigating the adverse effects of factors related to ineffective risk perception and communication. This could include the inclusion of respective factors in safety reporting schemes, investigation methods and analyses and, possibly, a tailored approach to the various flight stages and targeted risk literacy interventions.

Improving hand hygiene in hospitals: comparing the effect of a nudge and a boost on protocol compliance

Nudging has become a well-known policy practice. Recently, ‘boosting’ has been suggested as an alternative to nudging. In contrast to nudges, boosts aim to empower individuals to exert their own agency to make decisions. This article is one of the first to compare a nudging and a boosting intervention, and it does so in a critical field setting: hand hygiene compliance of hospital nurses. During a 4-week quasi-experiment, we tested the effect of a reframing nudge and a risk literacy boost on hand hygiene compliance in three hospital wards. The results show that nudging and boosting were both effective interventions to improve hand hygiene compliance. A tentative finding is that, while the nudge had a stronger immediate effect, the boost effect remained stable for a week, even after the removal of the intervention. We conclude that, besides nudging, researchers and policymakers may consider boosting when they seek to implement or test behavioral interventions in domains such as healthcare.

Risk Literacy Promotes Representative Understanding: Numerate People are Less Biased, More Knowledgeable, and More Concerned about Climate Change

Risk literacy skills, as measured by numeracy tests, are robust predictors of objective knowledge and risk understanding. However, for some people with extreme cultural worldviews, research suggests numeracy might slightly increase polarization of subjective perceptions of climate change risks. Here, we report the first integrated tests linking skills, worldviews, objective knowledge, beliefs, and subjective perceptions among diverse adults. Compared to less numerate people, regardless of cultural worldviews, highly numerate people were 5-8 times more likely to have accurate knowledge and beliefs (52% vs. 24% incorrect), and 3 times more likely to have above average risk perceptions. Structural modeling suggests numeracy may typically promote acquisition of accurate climate change knowledge, which then robustly informs beliefs and perceptions (e.g., up to 40 times stronger influence than worldviews). Even among people with extreme worldviews, rather than amplifying polarization, numeracy was associated with more representative understanding of climate change risks (e.g., well-informed and coherent).