Resource Pack: Role of Heuristics in Avalanche Education
2021
Making decisions about backcountry skiing requires one to predict, manage, and mitigate avalanche risk. Individuals need to understand and be comfortable with the language of probability, as well as appreciate the cognitive biases that can come into play in the context of decision making.
This collection includes articles that range from early attempts to identify “heuristic traps,” based on a retrospective analysis of avalanche accidents in the United States more than 20 years ago, to a recent paper that illuminates key gaps on how cognitive biases and human factors influence decision making translation in the avalanche education community.
Some authors refer to all human factors as “heuristics,” while others focus on misused heuristics from the behavioral decision sciences in the context of Bayes theorem. Some authors include concepts like “risk propensity” with cognitive biases, while others discuss the challenges of communicating risk and uncertainty and a lack of comfort with the language of probability. This resource pack focuses on backcountry skiing with selective resources on decision making in high-altitude mountaineering.
This resource pack has been assembled to support an avalanche education module on cognitive biases under development by Jake Waxman, and a public health module on heuristics under development by Sue Goldie.
Click here to download a PDF document of this complete pack
Source:
Resource Pack: Role of Heuristics in Avalanche Education. Center for Health Decision Science, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health 2021. https://repository.chds.hsph.harvard.edu/repository/collection/resource-pack-role-heuristics-avalanche