Empowering citizens against the typical misuse of data concerning risks

Risks have to be evaluated on the basis of information that media, advertisements and brochures pro- vide. These are often incomplete, reporting, for instance, only relative risks instead of both relative and absolute risks. While it is important for the informed citizen to be trained in the evaluation of scales and diagrams on risk-related topics it is also relevant that she acquires basic competencies for the understanding of risk; this requires, as is the claim of this paper, minimal effort. Results will be presented that demonstrate current deficits in the understanding of risk which are the consequence of misinformation or of bad representation formats and can be eliminated by a good yet elementary training in the understanding of basic risk-related concepts.