A psychological effect that leads to inaccurate judgments or interpretations of available information is the cognitive bias, considered to be a deviation or shortcut in mental processing which affects decision making.
Cognitive biases, also called traps or logical fallacies, are tendencies that, when considering situations, can lead to incorrect or ‘biased’ decisions. They are automatically acquired and created assumptions, beliefs, or attitudes. These mental phenomena appear in contexts where quickly deciding on an alternative is imperative, instead of analyzing the available choices.
These phenomena have been widely studied in psychology and show that we tend to misinterpret reality through distorting thoughts, which condition the way we decide how to perceive the environment around them. We adapt our decisions according to the importance we attribute to one or another particular condition of the context in which we find ourselves.
For example, we must decide to descend one slope or another. Depending on our preference, we attribute to the blue slope or the red slope a certain probability of success. If we choose the blue slope and fall, we may perceive it as a failure, then, the accumulated errors and successes will allow us to elaborate a rough estimate of the patterns that support the value for us of a blue slope, which could influence future decisions.
The decisions that we make on the slopes can be considered, in the vast majority of cases, to be effective, but sometimes we may unconsciously make systematic errors such as the following:
- Confirmation Bias: we have a propensity to seek or interpret information according to our preconceptions and our beliefs and not that information that objects to them. We perform a critical verification of information contradictory to our own beliefs, but readily accept that which is consistent with our personal thinking. EXAMPLE: the instructor deduces that he is not explaining anything interesting by observing his learners yawning.
- Personal Attribution Bias: consists in attributing our own personal skills in successes and the external context in failures. EXAMPLE: if an athlete wins a race, he thinks it is because of his effort, but if he falls, it is because he is tired.
- False Consensus Bias or Projection Bias: unconscious tendency to assume that others also have beliefs and thoughts similar to our owns, i.e., to assume that others are a projection of ourselves. EXAMPLE: a skier is convinced that his beliefs and opinions about the risk of skiing without a helmet are shared with the other members of the group.
- Correspondence Bias: this is understood as the propensity to disproportionately weight the behaviors and experiences of others. In this bias we judge others by their personality and us by the situation. EXAMPLE: if an athlete is late for training, other athlete of the team may think is a slacker, but if he himself is late it is because he is having a bad day.
- Anchoring Bias: this is the tendency to ‘anchor’ attention to only one part, usually the first one, of the available information. EXAMPLE: if a pair of skis has a retail value of five hundred, but is bought at three hundred, the memory will tend to anchor to the initial value.
- Illusion of Control Bias: describes the overestimation of our own control over external situations. It is the tendency to think that we can control or influence external factors. EXAMPLE: a freeride skier feels that he will have greater control over his future off-piste descent if he himself is in control of avalanche fall possibilities.
- External Responsibility Bias: it is the willingness to place responsibility for our decisions on external actors or events.
- Perceived Authority Obedience Bias: the propensity to follow someone who is perceived as an authority figure. EXAMPLE: a learner accepts the decisions of his instructor without questioning his ethical aspects or the methods he uses.
- Trailing Bias: the tendency to do or believe something on the basis that others also do or believe it.
- Bystander Bias: also known as “diffusion of responsibility”, is the predisposition not to intervene in an accident by rendering aid the more bystanders are there, presuming that others will do so, thus dissipating perceived responsibility.
- Availability Bias: states that erroneous conclusions are easily reached by overestimating the importance of available information from recent experiences. It deals with the propensity to rely on immediate examples that come to mind when making judgments about a person or situation. EXAMPLE: when hearing that a slope is scary and remembering that a friend had a nasty fall there, we are likely to perceive it that way before starting the descent.
- Overconfidence Bias: the tendency to be more confident in our own ability than we should be. It becomes a subjective assessment error in decision making in that we overestimate the success of our own decisions, which is potentially risky.
- Loss Aversion Bias, Cost Bias, or Commitment Intensification Bias: refers to the strong propensity to avoid losses when changing our mind or plan since the effort expended is lost, which would explain why it is difficult to change our decisions. The weighting of previous efforts, understood as costs, is taken into account when making decisions. EXAMPLE A: when waiting in a lift line, we observe that the line next to us is faster, then our preference will be to decide to stay in the same line because of the time (cost) we were waiting. We justify our willingness not to make a decision based on previous perseverance, even though the current choice is more beneficial. EXAMPLE B: delaying the decision to modify our own technique because of the effort we made to reach it.
- Complacency Bias: a feeling of consent accompanied by a lack of awareness of the present problem and a preference not to disturb our own comfort. EXAMPLE A: the wife who pleases her husband to go down a certain slope, even if she is not completely convinced that she can cope with the situation, because she prefers not to question his decision. EXAMPLE B: following the GPS directions to reach the lodging at a mountain destination, even though the suggested route does not seem to be the appropriate one. EXAMPLE C: the extreme skier who experiences a state of self-satisfaction with his descent feels pleased with the present circumstance, which can lead to a lack of awareness of potential risks on future descents.
- Group Pressure Bias: occurs when, instead of deciding by objectively evaluating the situation, inappropriate decisions are made due to a subjective reaction to the group decision.
- Unrealistic Optimism Bias: we consider ourselves less likely to suffer an incident, or less vulnerable than others, and more predisposed to positive events.
- Recoverability Bias: the frequency of past situations confirms preconceptions about similar present or future events. EXAMPLE: the subjective probability of losing our balance increases considerably when observing an area with frozen snow.
- Illusory Correlation Bias: resides in the evaluation of the frequency of occurrence of events that predisposes us to believe that they are associated. EXAMPLE: the tendency to think that a slope is always congested only when we are in a hurry to reach the base of the ski resort.
- Imagination Bias: when facing a new situation without the memory of a previous experience or a preconception, there is a predisposition to imagine the positive or negative aspects that could affect the probability of success or failure. EXAMPLE: if a group of skiers is about to embark on an off-piste skiing trip for the first time, the first thing they would do would be to assess the risks and imagine the positive or negative consequences they might face.
