UKH

I am a third-year at University and am looking for participants for my survey about the effects of climbing on perception of risk and would really appreciate as many participants as possible. Thanks https://forms.gle/tLLq9oisF7EHze7UA

Interesting.

Personally I found the scale jarring and I didn't quite understand what you wanted, what the picture made me feel (nothing in most cases) or how I might feel had I been the camera (a bit of a guess). Also calm is a feeling, 'extreme risk' is an assessment that can be made objectively, how one feels about extreme risk differs. Calm-Anxious or No risk- Extreme risk would be less jarring and confusing pairings. Maybe I'm overthinking it or missing what you'e getting at.

Anyway, hope it goes well.

jk

I suspect you'll get answers that correlate with the demographic here,  mixed up with a few darkness phobics.  

I didn’t go to university, but are you not exploring the affects of climbing...

No...'effects' is right in this context.

That was a fun one to answer. I am not sure that you will be able to draw any conclusions from my or other peoples answers as the response scale was not very good. It should have been 'low risk' to 'extreme risk', or calm to frightened! Good luck but think about re-designing and re-posting.

I asked this on the earlier thread about this survey but it got pulled for some reason before I read an answer. How are we supposed to assess the risk of a photo? For example with the one with the sea cliff in the storm, am I climbing, or sailing, or walking along the headland? Do I assume the guy pointing the gun at me is hostile? What do you mean precisely by 'the level of risk you feel within this image'?

All done, hope the study is successful.

The problem is there's not enough cues in the images about what your situation is in relation to the potential danger.  I ended up rating almost all of them right down at the fluffy puppy end of the scale but only because I didn't have enough information to do otherwise.

I think you're being asked about your instant emotional response to the image, not a risk assessment of any tangible situation. 

?

Good luck. The thought of the smelly, flea bitten, andrex puppy eating my shoes and leaving hair all over my house freaked me out the most.

Done. It sounds quite interesting. Hope you get usable results from us climbers

Maybe the finding is that climbers, by putting themselves in situations of apparent danger regularly, have trained themselves not to respond emotionally but to risk assess.

Hey - no cheating!

If that's the case then it should say so. Maybe it's my over-thinking but that itself is part of risk perception. It's still a good survey, much better than pretty much all the others posted on here (many of which are terrible) but a bit more explanation would be nice unless the lack of guidance is actually the point.

If we are just looking at the photo and going by our first gut reaction then the one of the big waves hitting the cliff is the hardest, as there is extreme danger on the cliff but hardly any danger in the fields on top of the cliffs.

I tried to complete this but found it very difficult to understand how I was expected to respond.  Am I supposed to be recording my emotional response to a photo (which might be very different from when faced with the actual situation)?  In any event, when a photo is presented without context it is difficult to react to it.  Or am I meant to be assessing the level risk in the situation illustrated, in which case, from which perspective?  Even then, perception of risk is not the same as how you respond to it.  It is often possible to perceive something as high risk while remaining calm, and it is often essential to do so - that is what climbers, soldiers and even car drivers do all the time.

Yes the scale of calm to danger is a bit wrong I think. If I was on a big mountain face I would be calm but I would also still be in danger. It should be calm-panick or safety-danger, and I agree that it's hard to know how to react; am I on the cliff with the huge waves coming at me or am I stood on the land above the cliffs?

Done. Good luck with it

Heike

Isn't that the whole point? The OP is not EXPECTING anything from you. They are asking you to say the first thing that comes into your head, and how you react to the photo. Leading you in any way would risk influencing your response.

Anyway that's my understanding of the exercise. The OP may wish clarify in general terms?

Survey completed. Good luck with your course.

I'm not expecting my response to be influenced, just trying to understand the nature of the response I'm being asked for.  Is it my emotional reaction to the photo, or how I risk-assess the situation shown?  The answers will be quite different.  This questionnaire seems to confuse how you perceive risk, which should be a logical process, with how you respond emotionally to it, which is an entirely different question and doesn't always respond to logic.  

I'm not being asked how I react to the photo, I'm being asked to "rate the level of risk you feel within this image", and to do so against a scale which has unrelated values at either end.  I'm not sure if the question intentionally uses poor English to deliberately obscure what it means.

I'm safe and warm indoors at home.  No photo is likely to alarm me, unless it were to trigger some remembered trauma (but that's different from assessing risk). If I'm being asked to consider what level of risk a scene in a photo might represent, in most cases that's difficult without more context.  Is the guy with the knife a stranger in an alley or a contestant on Masterchef?  Am I looking at the misty mountain through a window, or am I about to go up it?  Different answers every time.

Hi,

if you are interested, here’s a link to my TEDx of society’s screwed up attitude to risk. Hope it is useful.

youtube.com/watch?v=UR1FwZHVXq8&

I filled out the survey as you asked, putting down the first words/phrases that came into my head for each picture, but I don't think my answers will give you any idea of how climbing has affected my perception of risk. So in a nutshell: it hasn't. The only aspect that has changed (I hope) is my ability to assess risk levels on the rock and in the mountains. It certainly hasn't changed, for instance, the way I'd drive at night in freezing fog, or in the present situation  whether or not I'd join a large gathering not wearing masks. It also hasn't changed the perceived amount of risk I'd be willing to accept while climbing; I definitely did riskier things in my 20s, but only because I underestimated the risk before I started.

I'm also not sure how asking about the regularly climbed grade will help you. I'd attempt any well protected E1 with pleasure, but no way would you find me, at my present level, leading Californian Arete (E1 4c). I'd also think that even climbers performing at the very top level can have greatly different perceptions of risk, the two Alexes Megos and Honnold for instance.

Good luck with your survey (and it would be nice to get some answers to the many points raised in this thread; it's an interesting field.) 

I'm not sure climbers are any better at assessing risk than the general population. We like to assume some kind of 'climber exceptionalism' where we are apparently just sharper and nicer than the average Joe but how many times do you see climbers placing shit gear, abbing off things they shouldn't, getting caught in storms that were forecast, driving like idiots or smoking things they bought off a random person in the street? And you see loads of climber these days walking along the wall at Almscliffe or crapping behind a boulder at stanage so I think, especially with climbing being mainstream now, that we are just the general population. 

I can't really back this up at all as I have no data and it's just anecdotal but it's my unsupported 2p. 

Edit: forgot to mention the sorry state of some belaying!