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Heuristic traps in recreational avalanche accidents

"Evidence Of Heuristic Traps In Recreational Avalanche Accidents" is an excellent research work into the human factors in decision making process done by avalanche researcher Ian McCammon. Ian has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and his work brings a great contribution into avalanche research and education.

In this particular research Ian looks into 598 avalanche accidents and examines evidence that "heuristics - familiarity, social proof, commitment and scarcity - have influenced the decisions of avalanche victims." This is a different angle from which you can look at and examine avalanche accidents. Here is a link to the complete research paper as a PDF file on Ian's website - www.snowpit.com.

There is a plenty of evidence when recreationalists or even professionals had all the relevant information such as snow stability, terrain, avalanche forecast or potential hazard present that they were still caught in avalanches. Thus Ian's approach to this complex issue is very useful because when people have all the necessary information available then what is it that makes them blind - to ignore the clues or to interpret them incorrectly.

Our experience

From our experience, motivation and familiarity seem to influence us the most. We surely remember days when avalanche rating was considerable and even our snow stability testing supported that but we still chose to ski a certain slope.

By no means we simply chose to ignore those information. But as you know yourself the avalanches don't trigger just because the rating is considerable, so we looked for other clues as well. But looking back we think we might have been looking for the wrong ones. We think that motivation and familiarity influenced us towards interpreting the relevant clues in such a way that we could somehow justify our desired actions.

Common mistake

Simply said that if you have a motivation and a desire to ski a certain slope on a certain day you will automatically only look for clues that support that desire. Instead of adjusting the goal after examining the relevant information you adjust the information to fit with your goal.

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