Risk Literacy: What Can Adult Literacy Education Learn from the Decision Sciences?

Abstract

Choices, like which health/car insurance plan best meets both needs and budget, whether to evacuate for a hurricane or shelter in place, whether to participate in a protest during a global pandemic, or even which politician serves their communities’ interests in an upcoming election, all require adults to determine the risks and/ or rewards associated with alternative outcomes of these multifaceted, socially, and culturally embedded real-world problems (Gresch et al., 2013; Saal, 2015; Saal et al., 2020). Adults bring prior experiences, knowledge, and existing skills of inductive reasoning and evaluation to “not only effectively tackle these situations at an individual level but also to take part in public debates and make fair judgments on how the authorities deal with these issues at a local or global level” (Fang et al., 2019, p. 427).