Walking the Plank: An Experimental Paradigm to Investigate Safety Voice
The paper that put a number on the gap between what people say they would do about a hazard and what they actually do. Noort, Reader and Gillespie built the first experimental paradigm for safety voice, presenting participants with an apparent hazard, a wooden plank they are asked to walk across which looks too weak to hold them, and observing whether anyone raises it. Three studies: the first, with 129 participants, established that the paradigm elicits observable safety voice under randomised laboratory conditions; the second, with 69, that safety silence can be produced for a single hazard when concerns are held and no alternative way of addressing them is available; the third, with 75, that manipulating risk perception changes the behaviour.
The finding that earns its place here is a consistent mismatch between self-reported and observed safety voice across all three studies. Most of this corpus, and most of the psychological safety literature, rests on people reporting on their own willingness to speak. This is direct evidence that the reports and the behaviour come apart. The authors also propose a two by two typology separating concern from expression, which distinguishes silence held despite worry from silence held because nothing was noticed, a distinction survey items rarely make.
It is a methods paper and should be read as one. The hazard is artificial and the setting a laboratory, the samples are modest, and nothing here establishes that the same gap holds on a ward or a flight deck. What it establishes is that the gap exists at all, and that the field's dominant instrument cannot see it.
Save this paper to a bibliography, keep notes on it, and export citations. Create a free account →
Neighbours (9)
- Employee Voice and Silence
- Safety Voice and Safety Listening During Aviation Accidents: Cockpit Voice Recordings Reveal That Speaking-Up to Power Is Not Enough
- Speaking Up to Prevent Harm: A Systematic Review of the Safety Voice Literature
- Psychological Antecedents of Promotive and Prohibitive Voice: A Two-Wave Examination
- Silence That May Kill: When Aircrew Members Don't Speak Up and Why
- The Deepwater Horizon Explosion: Non-Technical Skills, Safety Culture, and System Complexity
- Measuring PS
- Speaking Up at Work
- Measuring PS: Questions First