Behavioral Insights for Policy Design in Risky and Vulnerable Situations

Full course description

The final course of the specialisation will put the concepts of risk, vulnerability, and risk management in a broader perspective. Risks are always to some extent “human-made” in terms of perceptions of facts and with relations between facts, and are thus subject to psychological and social dynamics. The extent to which possible future events are recognised, perceived, and labelled as risks, and the way they are framed, explained, and consequently managed depend on an interplay of social and psychological processes. This helps to explain the wide divergence in perceptions about what is, in essence, the same objective risk, as in the case of vaccinations, for example. By presenting relevant insights from the sociology, psychology, and economics of risk, this course intends to deepen students’ understanding of risk as a social-behavioural phenomenon, and consequently increase the options for effective risk management.