Measuring Risk Literacy: The Berlin Numeracy Test

By Edward T. Cokely, Mirta Galesic, Eric Schulz, Saima Ghazal, R. García‐Retamero. Judgment and Decision Making, 2012

688 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We introduce the Berlin Numeracy Test, a new psychometrically sound instrument that quickly assesses statistical numeracy and risk literacy. We present 21 studies (n=5336) showing robust psychometric discriminability across 15 countries (e.g., Germany, Pakistan, Japan, USA) and diverse samples (e.g., medical professionals, general populations, Mechanical Turk web panels). Analyses demonstrate desirable patterns of convergent validity (e.g., numeracy, general cognitive abilities), discriminant validity (e.g., personality, motivation), and criterion validity (e.g., numerical and non-numerical questions about risk). The Berlin Numeracy Test was found to be the strongest predictor of comprehension of everyday risks (e.g., evaluating claims about products and treatments; interpreting forecasts), doubling the predictive power of other numeracy instruments and accounting for unique variance beyond other cognitive tests (e.g., cognitive reflection, working memory, intelligence). The Berlin Numeracy Test typically takes about three minutes to complete and is available in multiple languages and formats, including a computer adaptive test that automatically scores and reports data to researchers (http://www.riskliteracy.org). The online forum also provides interactive content for public outreach and education, and offers a recommendation system for test format selection. Discussion centers on construct validity of numeracy for risk literacy, underlying cognitive mechanisms, and applications in adaptive decision support.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Management Science and Operations Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a77dacf686a9dccaea6b8b9b72fbd47e27db085e

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In Applied Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Management Science and Operations Research

Citations in the corpus

Natural Language Generation enhances human decision-making with uncertain information (2016, methodology): “of the game, users were scored according to their “risk literacy” following the Berlin Numeracy Test (Cokely et al., 2012).”
YOLO: Mortality Beliefs and Household Finance Puzzles (2015, neutral): “events and their contribution to asset prices, but only recently have scholars considered the ex ante beliefs of these rare events (Gao and Song (2015)).”
Beyond confidence: Development of a measure assessing the 5C psychological antecedents of vaccination (2018, background): “mentality [36], consideration of future consequences [41], the general risk attitude [42], empowerment [45], self-efficacy [44], and numeracy [64].”
Presenting quantitative information about decision outcomes: a risk communication primer for patient decision aid developers (2013, background): “, objective numeracy [121,134,126,135,136]; subjective numeracy [137]; graph literacy [61]; other aspects of the health literacy [138,139].”
Susceptibility to misinformation about COVID-19 around the world (2020, methodology): “We also measured participants’ numeracy level, which was calculated as the total score on three different numeracy tests: the three-item Schwartz test [49], the adaptive three-item Berlin test [50] and the answer to the following question: ‘What represents the highest chance of something happening: ”
Predicting biases in very highly educated samples: Numeracy and metacognition (2014, background): “mathematical competence, numeracy tests predict superior judgment and decision making because they assess (i) heuristic-based deliberation and metacognition (Cokely & Kelley, 2009; Cokely et al., 2012; see also Stanovich, 2012; reflectiveness, Baron, 1985), (ii) affective numerical intuition (Peters”