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SnowFlurry 14 2016/17 | The Unconscious Incompetence in Snow & Avalanche Science

Psychology in Powderhausen

by Lukas Ruetz 02/02/2017
For a change, we immerse ourselves in theoretical thought processes relating to people, the psyche and snow. A fundamental assumption: the distinction between experience and knowledge.

The competence level model

... is a model from developmental psychology and, like all models or constructs of reality, is actually wrong. Let's take a brief look at the basics of model building: A model in the scientific sense is a representation of reality. It is always incomplete, usually greatly simplified or distorted in order to be able to concentrate on essential aspects. Modeling is primarily about abstraction, because reality is too complex to represent it completely.

With regard to snow and avalanche science and the human basics that play into the profession, models help immensely to present difficult and highly complex facts in a simple way in order to understand situations or to raise the imagination to the next level. In most cases, however, the models themselves are wrong and have to be "deleted" afterwards as soon as they have fulfilled their purpose in order to enable further development steps first - but not to hinder them in the future. One example here is the widespread idea of the "ball bearing" in connection with weak layers in the snowpack: No weak layer functions like a ball bearing, because the descent of slab avalanches is about fractures, not about snow layers that are completely unbound - as would be the case with a ball bearing. Weak layers are "weak in binding", not "without binding", and simply break apart more easily - they don't roll through the area. Nevertheless, the ball bearing was a good, simple "model" to give a complete newcomer to the topic something they could grasp and to help their imagination.

In practice, the following classifications in the competence level model interlock completely seamlessly or flow into each other - but they still help with imagination.

The Unconscious Incompetence

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The competence level model describes in a thousand simplified ways that people can develop in many respects from unconscious incompetence through conscious incompetence and conscious competence to unconscious competence. With regard to snow, this means: At first, you are not aware that you have no idea about applied snow & avalanche science. You have neither experience nor knowledge. Decisions that are based entirely on your own experience are often intuitively wrong - an analysis based on experience or knowledge is not yet possible, there is only intuition.

The key point in this phase is that you believe you can handle the situation well or, based on the experience of the snow flurries, some people also believe in this phase that they have it all figured out and can assess it perfectly - to put it simply & exaggeratedly. The feeling of control is relatively high. You are simply unconsciously incompetent.

Conscious incompetence

As your experience increases, you become more and more aware that you can't or couldn't assess things properly (and have hopefully survived). You reach Conscious Incompetence - you slowly realize that you don't actually know anything or that you could know much, much, much more. The feeling of control regarding the correct assessment of the situation decreases. A technically based analysis is still hardly possible, as you still know too little - but your intuition's ability to assess the situation is improving.

Conscious competence

If you stick to applied winter sports and continue to disdain the cultural technique of reading, you skip the stage of conscious competence to a large extent: although you have not acquired any theoretical basics and do not fully understand what is going on in the snow, the quality of your decision-making still improves as a result of increasing experience and you achieve something like unconscious competence. To put it simply: you can't actually make decisions based on a well-founded analysis using data or the situation report, but the gut feeling gained from experience is no longer so bad and you can make relatively good decisions. Not really good ones, but relatively good ones. Except for the old snow problem, at least there you remain almost as bad.

Unconscious competence

If you stay on the ball, both practically and theoretically, you will slowly move from conscious competence to comprehensive unconscious competence: You have a wealth of experience and background knowledge, you may even be up to date with the latest research and can work with it, proper intuition combined with sound analysis. This status is probably only achieved by very, very few - perhaps only by those who have the opportunity to deal with it professionally.

Conclusion

The feeling of control with regard to the assessment of avalanches initially decreases somewhat with increasing experience and more knowledge. Defensive behavior is appropriate if you are not sure. With knowledge, the "phase of fear" can be alleviated somewhat. A complete sense of control can never be achieved with today's means - except for Chuck Norris. Why? We are still working with probabilities in relation to avalanches, a definitive prediction is not (yet) possible. This means that anyone can die in an avalanche, no matter how much they know or can do. However, the probability of dying in one varies greatly.

Note: From the perspective of the future, we are all unconsciously incompetent. Unfortunately, based on what we know today, far too many of us are unconsciously incompetent. It is up to each individual to at least raise themselves to the level of Conscious Incompetence.

This article has been automatically translated by DeepL with subsequent editing. If you notice any spelling or grammatical errors or if the translation has lost its meaning, please write an e-mail to the editors.

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