When you read incident reports and news coverage of highly public “accidents,” you often find references to a bystander who, somewhere along the line, saw that something was wrong but said nothing. In retrospect, that person’s decision not to speak up can seem heartless, weak or even immoral. A few words could have saved someone’s life or prevented an environmental disaster, we think to ourselves. But hindsight is, as psychologists have told us for decades, biased by our knowledge of subsequent events. 1 Moreover, we know entirely too many good, capable people in oilfield services, drilling, manufacturing and transportation companies (to name a few examples) to believe that industrial organizations are overrun with heartless individuals. This gave rise to some pressing questions, which led us to conduct a large-scale study of safety interventions in the workplace. First, we wanted to know how frequently employees intervene in the unsafe actions and conditions that they obser...