Are they experts? Self-assessed backcountry skills among backcountry skiers in Norway and North America

Abstract

We analyze how backcountry skiers’ perceived ability to manage avalanche terrain correlate with more objective measures of experience and skills, among 1209 backcountry riders in Norway and North America. We further analyze if self-assessed backcountry skills are affected by past experience of avalanches and close calls, risk attitudes, and demographics. Our results suggest that self-assessed skill to a large extent is a function of experience and knowledge, which is encouraging. However, we also find that men perceive their skills to be substantially higher than women when compared equally, at all levels of training and experience. Finally, we find that individuals with past experiences of avalanches and close calls rate their skills as higher than individuals without such experiences. Ourfindings provide suggestive evidence of a miss-match between perceived and actual skill, but more research is needed to control for selection effects and differences in objective skill levels.