WorkSafe: Don’t ask people to do Dangerous things, as they’ll probably do it.
Work
If you studied undergraduate psychology you would have been lucky enough to witness the great social psychology experiments of the 1960′s. These experiments were conducted long before ethic committees were set up and pushed the boundaries of insights into human behaviour.
One such series of experiments was conducted by Stanley Milgram, he was interested in understanding why normal people do horrible things, just because they are told to. That is, he wanted to understand how obedient people were, and why they obeyed others in authority, even to the point where their behaviours were harmful (look no further than the atrocities committed in Germany during World War II).
His experiments demonstrated that most people (around60 to 70%) were prepared to follow orders that involved harming others (viaelectrocution in this instance) if told to do so by an authority figure. Watch the video for more.
In 2012, we worked with WorkSafe Victoria to help the public understand that obedience still exists in the workplace. People still ask others do do dangerous things, and people still do the dangerous things asked of them. We adapted the Milgramexperiments and put them into a simulated workplace setting to see if peopleare still willing to obey requests, even if it means others may be harmed. See the video below – 90% (63 of 70) of people we asked to pass a dangerous live wire unprotected from one person to the next did so – and many did so repeatedly.
This experiment was supplemented byquantitative research (conducted by Galaxy Research) that showed thewillingness of supervisors to ask employees to do risky or dangerous acts incertain circumstances. The research found:
- One in five supervisors admitted they would ask their employees to bypass safety to complete a task quickly.
- One in four supervisors would bypass safety if a $1,000 performance bonus was at stake.
- Supervisors rate keeping up with productivity and meeting client deadlines as their most important priority ahead of safety
We’ve had some strong reactions to this ‘street experiment’. The Age wrote about it here
The Herald Sun here, and The Project (it’s about two minutes in) here. Plus a load of other comments online. All of this PR activity is helping reinforce the message that we should not be asking people to do dangerous things in the workforce as there is a good chance they’ll do it!
All of this activity can be viewed at Facebook.com/Worksafevictoria
This is one of the fantastic ads that inspired the experiment, along with Milgram’s original experiments of course.
Finally go to the Facebook page and measure your own level of obedience you might be in for a bit of a shock! (sorry about that).
