The PSY101 of Feeling Psychologically Safe

This commentary was inspired by a friend (yes you, Ashley) who had asked to compare notes on how we teach psychological safety. So I thought I would openly share what I have and what I use, in the hope that you, the reader, might share your own thoughts, ideas and materials with me too. To paraphrase the late Dr Bob Wears, there is more good to be gained from collaboration than competition.

The psychological safety space has its fair share of big names. Prof. Amy Edmondson’s seminal 1999 work established psychological safety as a shared team belief, that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. Dr Timothy Clark later popularized his “Four Stages of Psychological Safety”: inclusion, learner, contributor and challenger safety. My own approach to the topic began somewhere rather less glamorous, through the introductory psychology textbook and the dreaded PSY101 class.

Most psychology undergraduates will remember this mandatory tour, accelerating through the enormous breadth that forms the psychology discipline, accompanied by an equally enormous number of concepts, theories and experiments we were expected to get acquainted with. At the time, much of it felt like dense scientific memorization. Years later, I find myself returning to many of these same fundamentals, and appreciating just how much of human factors science is built upon them.

One of which is conformity. We like to believe that we are independent thinkers. If something is obviously wrong, surely we would recognize it as wrong. If we know the correct answer, surely we would say it. If everyone else disagreed with us, surely we would trust our own eyes, right?

The most famous demonstration came from Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments, first reported in the 1950s. Participants were asked to make a simple visual judgement, yet when the rest of the group confidently gave the same clearly wrong answer, many began to second-guess what they could plainly see and eventually went along with the group. The following video reenacts this classic experiment.

Asch's experimental variations further informed us on the factors that protected us from peer pressure. Introduce just one other person who gave the correct answer, and participants became much more willing to resist the majority. Allow people to give their answers privately instead of announcing them publicly, and conformity fell again.

This is why effective speaking up initiatives advocate the importance of supporting others who are trying to raise their concerns. Having a visible ally strengthens the feeling of psychological safety for such a daunting task. Similarly, effective whistleblowing channels provide an alternative route that affords confidentiality and protection from retaliation.

Conformity does not merely enable harm to others, but can also lead us to tolerate danger for ourselves. In 1968, Bibb Latané and John Darley studied how people responded when smoke began entering a room in which they were sitting. When individuals were alone, the presence of smoke was difficult to ignore. But when other people in the room remained strangely passive, participants became much less likely to act, this despite knowing something was off and potentially threatening.

This BBC production recreated this study. It showed just how uncomfortable it can be to make a choice, even an obviously correct one, when doing so means standing alone against everyone else in the room.

Peer pressure and group norms can thus compel and psychologically reward people to conform. What happens when those norms become established? Will people continue behaving according to them even when the original people who created them are no longer there? This clip from National Geographic's Brain Games TV series hints at how corporate culture is formed.

People enter organizations that already have histories. They observe how colleagues behave. They learn what gets rewarded, what gets ignored and what creates trouble. Newcomers watch experienced staff to understand “how things are really done around here”. Eventually those newcomers become the experienced staff whom the next generation watches to know how to "stay safe".

Perhaps this is why culture can be so stubborn. The people who originally created a particular way of working may be long gone, while the social cues they left behind continue reproducing themselves. We often describe it as something an organization either “has” or “does not have”. More likely, the group norm of an organization is formed from the hundreds of small interactions through which people continuously learn what is safe to say, safe to question and safe to do.

Psychological safety is experienced individually, but depends largely on what the group signals is acceptable and how the group makes the individual feel. Like many other human factors topics, it has roots in fundamental psychology concepts, despite PSY101 textbooks not explicitly spelling it out. More than just declaring "this is a safe space", establishing psychological safety requires us to reflect collectively on our vibe, and whether our everyday responses make it easier or harder for someone else to question, disagree, admit uncertainty or raise a concern.

Incidentally, my favorite PSY101 textbook was co-authored by Prof. Philip Zimbardo, the researcher behind the (yet another) famous Stanford Prison Experiment. The study became widely known for illustrating how powerfully situations, roles and social expectations can shape behavior, sometimes drawing people into actions they might never imagine themselves taking under ordinary circumstances. We are not shaped only by who we are, but also by the situations we find ourselves in and the norms that surround us. He passed away in October 2024.

What are some thoughts, ideas, concepts, or materials that you use to advocate for and help establish psychological safety? Please leave them in the comments or drop me a direct message or email. I would love to hear your approach and strategy!

PS: The unabridged version of my presentation actually details the role of human factors in creating and sustaining a positive safety culture. That shall have to be another sharing for another time.