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Interesting paper on heuristic traps in avalanche accidents

 Poster: A snowHead
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http://avtrainingadmin.org/pubs/mccammonhtraps.pdf
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Hmm. Sobering reading. Interesting that an unskilled group without a "leader" were less inclined to expose themselves to risk than when one "leader" was taking the decision. If decisions were taken by consensus they were presumably more likely to wimp out - because if one member of the group decided that to proceed was unsafe, they would all go along with that. But groups with skilled leaders also fell for willy-waving and "first tracks" blindness to risk. I'm not an off-piste skier, but if I were, one conclusion from this study is that it would be best to stick to all-female groups. wink

Difficult to draw conclusions about the overall value of having a highly experienced leader. Within the accidents studied, there wasn't really an advantage but, presumably (?hopefully) there are, overall, more off piste ski groups who do have experienced leaders but who don't get killed in accidents. So if that is right, and fatalities happen to a smaller proportion of skilled groups than unskilled groups, the training and experience is still worth something?

Sampling error?
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I've also noticed a tendency for familiarisation to occur within the time taken to complete a route. The three times I have had first hand experience of small slides all occurred towards the bottom of the route, suggesting that hazard avoidance and careful evaluation of the conditions tended to play more of a role when starting out and higher up the mountain. Near the end of a route we often switch off and start relaxing, this phenomena is well known as a factor in mountaineering accidents.

One thing to bear in mind is that as you get lower in altitude, although wind loading may be less of a factor, the temperature increase often poses a greater risk.
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I'd read that before I think, but it seems reasonable although I've not looked at the data behind it at all.

My background in other sports makes me hostile to the idea of groups with formal "leaders" for anything other than novices. I've rescued schoolkids from places no sane expert would go - they were there because their deceased leader took them there.

In snow... well if you've got a leader, you have to decide who rides down first. The obvious answer is that one "leader" who can pick the best/ safest line, who won't get lost, and who knows how to ski cut the slope. But if she goes down, then who's left to deal with it? What if one of the rest of the group (who are riding down one by one, marshalled somehow...) falls in a dangerous place? If there's a respectable risk then I want to be with people who are self reliant.


In back country snow there's a high objective/ subjective risk ratio. There's no real pay off for walking away. Hang gliding is similar ... I gave that one up as my ability to walk away from the risks on the hill was less than I felt it should have been. Translation: I could see how I could kill myself very easily. The same's true with snow, except I'm always in a group of experienced people - if the 18-year-old in me wanted to do something stupid, those guys would soon dissuade me. It's a sort of "inverted leadership", I'd say.
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pam w wrote:
Hmm. Sobering reading. Interesting that an unskilled group without a "leader" were less inclined to expose themselves to risk than when one "leader" was taking the decision.


A very interesting chart in fig5. ref untrained v advanced groups and leaders. Untrained groups with no leader seem to choose less exposure.
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AndAnotherThing.., Yes, I guess because the group goes with the decision of the most risk-averse. If you were in a leaderless group and one said "I really don't like the look of that" then you'd probably all give up, wouldn't you?

I'm not sure about the concept of leaders only for novices. I have done quite a bit of sailing, mostly in the past, sometimes as skipper, sometimes as crew. I have been very pleased to be with an experienced skipper who could make the decision to carry on in conditions where, if I were skipper, I'd have given up, aware of my limitations. I wasn't a novice, but that doesn't make me an expert, either and if I'd never gone with a more experienced leader I'd never have sailed in really heavy weather/bad visibility - I was glad to have done so.
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pam w, I don't like sailing as an analogy.

I do a lot of sailing, I used to make my living as a skipper.

Carrying on in difficult sailing conditions is different to decision making off piste. Mainly because you're (literally) in the same boat. And also, things do build up, and you can be sailing in really snotty conditions for a while before you learn how to really deal with it. Different in the mountains where the key leadership decision is often "don't ski that".
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flaming, yes, it isn't really a very good analogy, I agree. But it is right, I think, that someone with "intermediate" skills can profitably learn, and enjoy themselves, out with an experienced leader, especially if that leader is explaining the reasons for their decisions ("we aren't going to take that course today because I don't want to be out in such high winds on a dangerous lee shore" or "in this visibility I don't want to cross the shipping channel but we can safely follow the contours along to the west, it's too shallow for anything big").
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I've just about never been in the skiing with "leaders" situation. (I'm assuming that these so called "leaders" don't include qualified High Mountain Guides). Normally I'm either with a guide who I know knows a huge amount more than I do, or I'm with people with the same experience as me, in which case we avoid some of the slopes a guide might ski, but also (we hope) those he wouldn't.
Good article, though, and the "I skied here yesterday so I expect it is still safe" fallacy is particularly getting to me. I think I fall for that a bit.
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snowball, the study shows that well trained leaders don't make significantly better or worse decisions than well trained individuals coming to a decision collectively. What it does show is that familiarity can be a big problem for well trained individuals in general causing them to take larger risks than they would elsewhere. Part of the problem with the 'Expert Halo' is that it is given without merit and partly that it prevents people speaking up when they have valid information that the genuine expert may not be aware of.

None of which is to disparage mountain guides but to show that they along with everyone else are only human and need to know and take these things into account. The mountain doesn't care how much experience you have. Toofy Grin
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Quote:

the study shows that well trained leaders don't make significantly better or worse decisions than well trained individuals coming to a decision collectively

does it? I missed that bit.

It certainly finds that a group led by an untrained leader takes more risk than a group of equally untrained individuals.

Quote:
the difference in exposure score was quite pronounced for those parties who were led
by someone with minimal or no avalanche skills. What is surprising about this trend is that untrained parties with no leader (who presumably made decisions by some type of consensus process) exposed themselves to less hazard than they would have if they were relying on an unskilled leader. In other words, unskilled parties seemed to attribute more avalanche
knowledge to their leader than to themselves, even when that leader had no such knowledge.


It also says - more worryingly - that;

Quote:
exposure scores did not significantly decrease with training.
and that

Quote:
parties with advanced training that were traveling in familiar terrain exposed their parties to about the same hazards as parties with little or no training.


However, as I conjectured above, there may be a kind of "sampling error" as the study only looked at accidents. Perhaps a higher proportion of well-led groups than of untrained groups escaped unscathed, in which case some of the numbers might be dubious. Unless I have misunderstood the whole thing; entirely possible.
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pam w, we're quite possibly demonstrating the sampling bias in reading the paper as well, a little further down the section you quote from:
Quote:
Leaders with avalanche training, however, did not make decisions that were significantly worse than those made by trained groups through a consensus process, a result that suggests that leadership by a well-trained individual will result, as we would expect, in more prudent behavior by the party in avalanche terrain.
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One might as well say "Social factors can adversely affect decision making". This is very true - it depends on how motivated people are etc. I regularly watch people making decisions whether to climb Mt Blanc when they are pushed for holiday time and their guide is trying to explain that the weather really is not good enough. Weather cancelled 3 of my own attempts this summer, better thoroughly pissed off than dead though. But watching others - if not for a voice of reason i.e. the guide refused to g,o how many more accidents would there be? In regard to training I still say that some is better than none at all. A little bit of knowledge is better tan a whole load of ignorance!
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Quote:

Leaders with avalanche training, however, did not make decisions that were significantly worse than those made by trained groups through a consensus process, a result that suggests that leadership by a well-trained individual will result, as we would expect, in more prudent behavior by the party in avalanche terrain.

That sentence doesn't make sense as it stands. The first part says that trained leaders don't make (significantly) worse decisions than trained groups make by consensus - so the conclusion is a non sequitor.
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Yeah it relies on looking at the data under discussion. The comparison here is between inexperienced groups with a well trained leader versus well trained groups making decisions by consensus.
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or even untrained groups making decisions by consensus if the chart in fig 5 is anything to go by.
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It would be really interesting to see the research updated to determine if the wearing of airbag rucksacks is a significant contributor to decision making
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I doubt that the study involved proper qualified mountain guides. I think they would have said so and made them a specific category. They hardly exist in the USA.
The guide I ski with regularly constantly amazes me by the precision of his understanding of snow.
We were once traversing a slope but I was about 5 metres above the others. The guide stopped and indicated that I stop. There was a very slight, almost imperceptible dip or gully across our path - perhaps 6 metres across and dipping in less than half a metre. He said that it was OK where they were about to cross but up where I was it would probably slip. However I could ski it if I wanted since the layer was not deep and I would just slide down about 10 metres and would not be in danger.
They skied across it and stopped. I was intrigued and decided I ski across where I was and see what happened. As he had predicted a shallow area of snow a couple of metres across slid down to just where he had said it would, with me on the top (though my skis, which came off, were under the snow).


Last edited by Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see? on Sat 12-10-13 12:00; edited 1 time in total
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snowball, reassuring, that!
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snowball, I don't think that's right myself, for a start what do you mean by properly qualified? There is no need to be UIAGM cert'd to guide skiing as skiing is only one component of that qualification you also need to be a handy rock, mixed, Alpine and ice climber. Some UIAGM guides are not very good skiers for example! The USA, Canada, New Zealand and recently the UK have specific ski guiding qualifications. In terms of sport specific exposure to avalanche risk skiing is right up there. Anyway the study is specifically talking about avalanche qualifications with specifics about what it means to be in the advanced group which would include those with guiding qualifications. That said lots of experience is vital in developing good snow sense particularly when dealing with micro-terrain which as your anecdote shows is pretty important.

As an example the ACMG route to becoming a Ski Guide requires you to have done two courses purely related to Avalanche Operations the first of which is 7 days long and the latter requires two years of experience in the field before you can even apply to take it. Advanced qualification means what it says and it's bloody stupid to say there aren't many 'proper' guides in the USA.
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UIAGM guide qualification takes many years (between 5 and 10 years - much more than the 2 you mention) and of course it was the snowcraft and avalanche expertise I was talking about which is the main reason it takes so long (though also of course only UIAGM guides are allowed to guide on glaciers, and there is a large climbing component as you mention). It seems to me that you can assume a level of snow craft which you cannot assume with ski teachers who also guide.
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snowball, but that's the point, your assumption is incorrect. The Ski Guide course and the UIAGM cert both do the same things. In fact in Canada the Ski Guide training scheme is the skiing portion of the full guide course, the others being rock and alpine climbing which are done separately and are also separate quals for people that only want to guide rock or alpine climbing. Also contrary to your assertion regular Ski Guides are allowed to guide on glaciated terrain. You have an understandably Eurocentric view of things but are dead wrong in the assumptions you are making.
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snowball there is no specification in the article as to what a 'trained leader' is but i would be very wary about discounting IFMGA guides from this. You only have to look at the number of fatalities and accidents involving guided parties to see they can equally be included in this grouping.
More than that, a look at some of those accidents would show that other heuristic traps come into play with exactly these 'uber-experts' - the 'familiarity' trap giving lie to the notion that only a local guide can really keep you safe.
As for IFMGA Guides having way more training than ski teachers I suggest you look a little more closely at what is involved in each qualification in terms of off piste/snow safety (talking fully ticketed up BASI L4 / French BE ski here). The majority of guides training and assessment takes place in climbing situations, a relatively small part is concerned with skiing, avalanche avoidance etc (particularly small given how large a part of a lot of guides business off piste skiing and touring is).
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I have to confess I don't know what you mean by "Ski-Guide". I have only met UIAGM guides and Ski Teachers. Are these people who work from the guides office but are not UIAGM? I have regularly been told that only UIAGM were allowed to guide on Glaciers!

I had heard that Canadian guides were affiliated in some way with the UIAGM of recent years but in North America I have no experience with being guided except in-bounds which doesn't really count (Extremely Canadian and Jackson Hole Steep and Deep). We skied out of bounds at Jackson Hole on our own because we were told guides were not allowed to take us (There were almost no tracks). I admit this is rather slender experience to base anything on.
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snowball, it's not really a qual that exists in Europe AFAIK. The closest is the likes of offpisteskiing and others who are highly qualified ski instructors. In places with more plentiful skiing only guiding (heli ops, cat ops, touring lodges) it's pretty normal for people to only be qualified in guiding skiing. Summer jobs might be guiding rock climbing, guiding white water in some form or unrelated to outdoor tourism. You naturally also get UIAGM qualified people.

All countries involved have their own scheme/body that trains guides to meet UIAGM/IFMGA standards. In the UK that's the BMG. Both Canada and the US have been training people to that standard for quite some time. It's hard to get because it means operating and demonstrating experience in a wide variety of activities at a reasonably high level. It does not mean you will be better than someone who makes the choice to specialise in one discipline for whatever reason.

Naturally none of this is a reflection on individuals.
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pam w wrote:
Hmm. Sobering reading. Interesting that an unskilled group without a "leader" were less inclined to expose themselves to risk than when one "leader" was taking the decision. If decisions were taken by consensus they were presumably more likely to wimp out - because if one member of the group decided that to proceed was unsafe, they would all go along with that.


Contrariwise there's a whole raft of research from the business world on group decision making that has concluded the opposite - that groups make riskier decisions than members would on their own. "Type 1 groupthink" in Irving Janis' terminology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

Does anyone think a group of a dozen teenagers makes safer decisions than one or two teenagers on their own? If not, why do we think our decision making in a group is so very different?
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meh, Oh well, my statement about glaciers (which I thought was so well known I nearly didn't say it) and fairly much everything else I said, was always about Europe. I have no idea who can do what outside of there. I have only skied those two times in North America and have no plans to go again. Perhaps I have been put off too easily but I didn't find an equivalent to the extensive, wild, lift accessed / semi lift accessed skiing with guides which I enjoy here.
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Guides?
There may not be that many French-approved trade union guides in North America, but there are lots of extremely competent and professional guides (or heli). The work and the patterns are different, and so in many cases are the qualifications. And the politics wink

Groupthink?
The research doesn't I believe say that this will occur in all cases of groups, just that it may occur in some quite specific circumstances.

Undoubtedly some groups work this way in business, but they also work the other way, for example ...
If you have group of "public service" managers making a decision, they will always take the "no risk, no blame" solution. They usually have no incentive to achieve (they cannot take home any money they save the tax payer), but they have lots of incentive not to fail (eg final salary pensions, incremental pay grades etc).


So I think it depends on the set-up: what the risk/ reward prospects are for the individual in each case.

Teenage Groups
I've rescued various groups of teenagers. I'm not convinced that their risk increases particularly as the group size increases (data?). These were almost exclusively groups with official "leaders", which is perhaps why I'm prejudiced against that structure: I blame the leaders for making obviously poor decisions which I doubt the individuals would have had the courage to take.
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I have found that Americans I have talked to say that in America people are not used to the idea of hiring guides to ski with and I have to push them in Europe to do so to get the best out of our off-piste. This was the basis for my impression that they didn't have that many qualified guides (outside of heli skiing, of course).
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philwig wrote:

Teenage Groups
I've rescued various groups of teenagers. I'm not convinced that their risk increases particularly as the group size increases (data?). These were almost exclusively groups with official "leaders", which is perhaps why I'm prejudiced against that structure: I blame the leaders for making obviously poor decisions which I doubt the individuals would have had the courage to take.


Individuals wouldn't have the courage but groups often do. Nobody wants to be the party-pooper or the wuss. If your experience is different, I guess your teenage years were different to mine!
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dogwatch, I was only concluding what I did on the basis of the research paper in consideration, which found that inexperienced groups made less risky decisions than the inexperienced leader of an inexperienced group. And in the case of experienced groups the author concluded that whether or not they had a leader made no significant difference in terms of exposure to risk.
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snowball,
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You mentioned that in some places only UIAGM guides are allowed guide on glaciers. My impression is this was due to their training and competence at crevasse rescue, rather than superior "snowcraft" versus other "guides", eg ski instructors who take clients off piste
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In Europe I have been told this is the case. Though probably the American guides previously mentioned might also do so, if they were visiting over here - just as UIAGM guides can guide over there (I think). You could be right about the reason (combined with the fact that they will have rope and harnesses etc on them. I sometimes do too, when I am not with a guide.)

I gather that you cannot ski the backcountry of many (most?) US resorts using resort lifts. Is this true for guides too?
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For my tuppenceworth on this, it's sobering to look at the collected avalanche fatality statistics and see how many were skiing in guided parties or were guides themselves. Quite a significant proportion.

Henry Schneiwind's been talking a bit recently about having a two-way conversation with your guide about how much risk you're willing to take and I think that's important so expectations are aligned. So you can charge hard with your guide keeping you as safe as possible, or stay in low risk terrain with minimal risk, depending on your attitude.
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snowball wrote:

I gather that you cannot ski the backcountry of many (most?) US resorts using resort lifts. Is this true for guides too?


If it's a closed boundary a guide card doesn't buy any special privileges AIUI. They can ski up outside the boundary if it's public access land but not take lifts to access. But also you don't find many UIAGM guides touting for business around ski resorts either. I guess you could rock up in Aspen and if you are lucky hire Beidleman or throw a stick in Jackson and hit a bunch but a lot of their work will be taking client trips elsewhere.
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The point of taking a guide is to be taken on routes you are not, with your own knowledge, confident are safe. Plus of course making use of his knowledge of where the good snow will be, but that is less hard to work out and less serious if you get it wrong. You also pay for his previous knowledge of good routes in the resort, but as our guide, Zeb, often says: a good guide should be able to guide anywhere.

I gather a Jackson Hole there is some sort of agreement with the National Park which prevents the guides taking clients in the local back country. Or perhaps it was just forbidden starting from the lifts. ( Not that we actually found a guide). Weird, but it was what we were told when we asked. Which was why we did it on our own with a map (misjudging the time the skinning would take and then finding our proposed steep way back dangerously wind scoured and icy as the sun set, so we had to change to another slope, skiing back into Jackson after 6.30 (in mid January) in total darkness. Luckily two of us had head torches!!).


Last edited by Then you can post your own questions or snow reports... on Sun 13-10-13 21:48; edited 1 time in total
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evski wrote:
... So you can charge hard with your guide keeping you as safe as possible, or stay in low risk terrain with minimal risk, depending on your attitude.

You could, but personally I've never seen anyone ask a guide to take them on safer/ less steep terrain for reasons of avalanche risk. You will hear guests whining when they can't ride the steeps because the snow pack is dangerous. They complain about being kept safe. Perhaps that's indicative of the nature of the risk.

I've not seen any guide bow to commercial pressure to ride what's not safe, although last year I rode with a chap who described precisely that, resulting in a couple of fatalities. These days my buddy refuses to ride anywhere the guides' pay is related to what's ridden.
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philwig wrote:
. where the guides' pay is related to what's ridden.
That has got to be extremely stupid.
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RE : USA.
In North America there is no real culture of hugh mountain / UIAGM guiding like we have in europe. The UK for example has many more UIAGM qualified guides than the entire USA. A significant % of the 100 or so american qualified guides end up working in Chamonix or La Grave because there is generally little work for them in the USA (apart from Alaska). In north america the guides course is split into 3 elements (rock, ice, ski) but you only become full UIAGM and go on glaciers when you have all 3 qualifications.

RE : UIAGM vs Ski Instructor.
I think it is fair to say that a UIAGM is way more qualified to guide in an off-piste environment than an L4 ski instructor (who just needs 10 days off piste training). However : the UIAGM might suck at skiing, and the ski instructor might be clueless off piste (to make a sweeping generalisation). In reality both qualifications are a high standard and they are both likely to be very good.

RE : Heuristic Traps.
To state the obvious more experience groups / people will spend more time off piste and also use their skills to look for more challenging routes. If you are going to stick your head in the lions mouth then be prepared that something might eventually happen. FWIW I think humans are bad at judging risk or assesing statistically probability. For example : if you ski a slope that is suspect and get "away with" then you tend to build a "false sense of security" over time.


Last edited by Ski the Net with snowHeads on Mon 14-10-13 7:49; edited 1 time in total
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