Designing pension communication Lessons from the medical domain

Abstract

Pension participants face complex decisions which require them to choose between multiple alternatives that have different consequences, that vary in likelihood, and that often relate to different values. In the medical domain, ample research has been conducted on how to support patients in making such decisions, yielding three important lessons. First, by emphasizing the gist of information, the information becomes more meaningful to participants. Second, value clarification methods should be used to help participants retrieve or form their own values and compare those with the decision alternatives. Third, simple static visual aids facilitate the comprehension of statistics and probabilities.