Civilian heroes - How much (digital) moral courage do you have?

The purpose of the project was investigating how information and communication technologies could serve for interactive and dialog-oriented communication of security-related content between authorities and the public. A particular focus was not only on effectiveness in terms of crime prevention, but also economic efficiency. Based on the findings from various research fields, an interdisciplinary research network developed a communication platform and integrated three exemplary communication measures on it. One of the communication measures, consisting of an interactive film and online games on the topic of violence, was subjected to a rigorous outcome evaluation. The results show that the communication measure was able to increase moral courage among Facebook users by 6.5%. Since moral courage increases the likelihood of apprehension, this leads an equal decrease in violent crime, ceteris paribus. Assuming costs of 487,500 €, the project would break even at an average cost of about 12,000 € per violent crime.

The Start date of the project was 01/11/2021 and the project is still running