SKIING PSYCHOLOGY - Cognitive Biases

Building on our previous analysis of skier psychology, Part 2 of “Cognitive Biases in Skiing” shifts the focus from awareness to mitigation. In this continuation, we break down advanced cognitive errors that affect risk assessment, technique execution, and terrain choice.

Hindsight Bias or A Posteriori Bias: refers to the propensity to perceive past events as predictable events and to evaluate them more positively than they actually happened or as if it had been possible to anticipate them. EXAMPLE: “I knew it was going to happen” exclaims a skier after resting his skis on a railing which, at a given moment, tilts causing the other skis and boards that were resting on the same place to fall.

Memory Bias: it is known that memory is not perfect as it dissipates over time causing unconscious errors. When making decisions, it can be said that a ‘biased’ or skewed memory of stored memories is used. EXAMPLE: Skiers tend to remember past ski trips as being much better than they actually were, filtering out the negative details.

Reactance Bias: doing the opposite of what others say, especially when perceiving threats to one’s freedoms or feeling pressured to accept a point of view or attitude. It is a distortion of one’s perception of the social order and one’s place in it. EXAMPLE: an athlete refuses to train downhill, even though the coach and parents ask him to do so.

Zero-risk Bias: preference for completely eliminating a lesser risk rather than mitigating a greater risk that provides a better outcome. EXAMPLE: an instructor tries to eliminate the risk of his learner becoming frustrated by not allowing him to leave the beginner’s area, rather than mitigating the risk of practicing on a more demanding slope but allowing the continuity of his evolution.

Choice Support Bias: this is the preference to positively distinguish a decision, even if it is flawed. EXAMPLE: the skier chooses a slope to descend, but as the slope turns out to be less steep than expected, the snow conditions are praised. Having made a decision, he is conditioned by it and modifies his point of view.

Belief Bias: the tendency to accept arguments based on the credibility of their conclusions, rather than the evidence supporting them. EXAMPLE: a skier makes arguments in support of another skier’s proposal to descend a slope with bumps and the skier accepts them, believing in these arguments despite the lack of validity they have.

Disagreement Bias: willingness to criticize negatively that which is contrary to one’s own thoughts and to accept that which is appropriate to one’s own beliefs. EXAMPLE: Skiers aggressively defend their own rhythm and pacing while demonizing groups that do things differently.

Frequency Illusion Bias: when an event happens like an avalanche fall, it is believed that it happens more often than it actually does.

Confidence Illusion Bias: tendency to grant greater credibility to someone the more confident he or she is in the presentation of his or her arguments. EXAMPLE: In ski schools or group clinics, charismatic instructors who use bold, definitive statements are often believed over those who use precise, scientific explanations.

Naive Cynicism Bias: propensity to expect a more egocentric bias in others than in oneself in both intentions and actions. EXAMPLE: the skier believes that the only reason another does something good for him is out of self-interest.

Survivor Bias: attention is directed toward one person who achieved success in one domain, but not toward all others who did not. EXAMPLE: the performance of a coach whose athlete from the group reached the podium in the Olympics is evaluated, but all other athletes who did not achieve it are not taken into account.

Idyllic Hindsight Bias: refers to the predisposition to perceive the past in an idyllic way and the present in decline. EXAMPLE: belief that the skiing environment used to be better, i.e., for the skier with this mindset, yesterday makes more sense than the here and now.

In-group Bias: tendency to help skiers who are in the same group and not those who are not.

Status Quo Bias: the propensity to choose not to do something different from what is already being done, i.e., to prefer what remains stable. This way of thinking makes it difficult for the skier to make decisions about learning and modifying his behaviors. EXAMPLE: Skiers often resist changing their body mechanics because their old muscle memory feels safe and predictable.

Knowledge Curse Bias: once knowing something, one assumes that everyone else knows it too. EXAMPLE: an instructor who does not remember the difficulties the learner experienced in modifying technical behavior because he does not put himself in the learner’s shoes.

Clustering Illusion Bias: refers to the tendency to falsely consider that clusters or patterns of small samples, cases, or situations are not casual. It is thought that the “streak” of successes, or failures, will keep repeating itself, so it can lead to making wrong decisions. EXAMPLE: an athlete who usually does not reach the podium, but does so consecutively in the following two races, may interpret as a tendency to continue reaching those places in the next competitions.

Blind Prejudice Bias: belief in not having prejudices and seeing them in others. EXAMPLE: a classic mountain rivalry where skiers blame snowboarders for ruining the snow, entirely blind to their own impact on the terrain.

Hostile Attribution Bias: indicates the tendency derived from cognitive distortion to attribute a hostile intention in the behaviors of others, even if they are ambiguous or benign. EXAMPLE: after descending a slope, a skier with a high hostile attribution bias observes others laughing and immediately interprets that they do so because of his skiing.

Defensive Attribution Bias: represents becoming angrier with someone who commits a reckless act of which one perceives oneself could have been a victim. EXAMPLE: a skier is more exasperated with someone who runs over another skier nearby because he thinks he himself could have been knocked down, than when he observes a similar collision but outside his personal space.

Moral Luck Bias: the tendency to morally evaluate someone independently of factors beyond one’s control. It is judging the actions of another by leaving aside everything that does not depend on that person. EXAMPLE: two skiers leave a mountain bar after drinking alcohol and resume their descent to the base of the ski resort. One of the two runs over someone and hurts him. The social propensity will be to judge with greater moral severity the person at fault for the incident, but not the person who did not hit anyone, but was skiing drunk, which is dangerous and morally reprehensible behavior.

Naive Realism Bias: one believes that one observes reality objectively and that others are irrational, uninformed, or biased. EXAMPLE: A skier judges the appropriate speed of a trail purely by their own comfort level, assuming everyone else is driving either like a maniac or a turtle.

Stereotype Bias: one adopts a generalized belief or prejudice towards something or someone without sufficient information. EXAMPLE: Terrain Park skiers and snowboarders are often stereotyped as reckless or disrespectful based entirely on their fashion and posture.

Peak-end bias: an experience is evaluated by the feelings, pleasant or unpleasant, experienced at the peak or at the end of the situation without taking into account the other sensations. EXAMPLE: an athlete evaluates a training session positively or negatively by the best or the worst descent he had that day, as he can also evaluate it by how he felt at the end of the practice.

Complementarity Bias: refers to the psychological tendency to automatically match or counter someone else’s behavior with a corresponding, expected behavior. EXAMPLE: when one skier is hostile to another’s ideas, the other will be hostile to yours. If he is curious and respectful of others’ ideas, they will act in the same way.

Competence Bias: it is about not knowing how much or how little one knows, because one does not know how much or how little others in a social environment know. EXAMPLE: skiing with the same group of friends for years creates a false baseline of technical mastery.

Awareness Bias: certain things cannot be understood from where someone is, but if he continues to evolve, he will be able to understand what is now inaccessible to him. EXAMPLE: intermediate skiers physically cannot comprehend how to separate their upper and lower body movements until their lower joints evolve.

Normality Bias: refers to the tendency to underestimate the probability as well as the effects of an incident on the basis that everything will continue to work the same way. It is the false belief that, if one’s own skiing has been ‘normal’ so far, nothing bad will happen in the future. The skier who has this cognitive distortion tends to react late to accidents or emergency situations because he underestimates their occurrence and, if they do occur, minimizes the effects. This bias also manifests itself in natural phenomena such as avalanches. These are frequent events in mountain areas but since the vast majority of skiers have never experienced one there is a generalized propensity that they will not occur.

Egocentric Bias: remembering one’s own technical execution as being significantly better and smoother than it actually was. EXAMPLE: a skier confidently remembers carving beautifully down a black diamond run. However, when a friend shows the video they shot of that exact run, they are shocked to see the arms flailing, the hips dropping, and their balance completely off.

Telescoping Effect: recalling exceptional events as happening much more recently than they actually did. EXAMPLE: telling a friend, “Two or three seasons ago, this specific off-piste bowl had chest-deep powder, so we should definitely hike up there today.” In reality, that legendary snowstorm happened eight years ago during an unusual weather anomaly.

Recency Effect: the brain overemphasizes the very last moments of an experience when judging the quality or safety of the entire day. EXAMPLE: a skier struggles with poor form, burning thighs, and bad visibility for four hours. However, on your final run, the sun comes out, and nails a smooth, perfect line. Heading to the lodge declaring, “What an incredible day of skiing!”—completely ignoring hours of struggle and fatigue, which might lead him to overestimate his current fitness level for tomorrow.