You want to make reporting harm normal. Introduce a culture of active bystandership.

This piece highlights that human silence isn’t inevitable. It suggests that a culture of active bystandership leads to increases in both early informal action and in the formal reporting of harm to line managers and HR departments.  The piece makes use of social science dating back to 1961 to support it’s conclusion.

In my work with different organisation there’s one consistent outcome that is achieved once the organisation starts to develop a culture of active bystandership – disclosures and reports increase.  It’s something I’ve noticed across the different types of workplace settings and confirms what the past research tells us, that silence isn’t inevitable.

Read most written pieces of workplace harm and abuse and you will be faced with articles that focus on the silence of those who either witness harm or are told about it.  It’s almost like, we just must accept that silence is the norm.  In my professional opinion it’s not.  Social science definitely confirms that speaking up is easier said than done.  The same science however does say that silence can be overcome.

A culture of active bystandership doesn’t magically create more wrongdoing. It changes the physics of silence.  In most organisations or communities, people don’t stay quiet because they approve of harm. They stay quiet because reporting feels risky, lonely, and socially expensive.  When costs outweigh the benefits most people remain silent.  Active bystandership rewires that calculation.

First, it shifts what feels normal. Speaking up is often seen as a transgression against the group norm. When people regularly see others naming concerns, interrupting behaviour, or checking in, reporting stops looking like betrayal and starts looking like participation. Humans are sensitive to social cues. Once speaking up is visible, silence becomes the deviant act.

Second, it lowers the psychological cost of action. Reporting is rarely about not knowing the rules; it’s about fear of retaliation, being labelled difficult, or misreading the situation. An active bystander culture provides rehearsal. People practice noticing, naming, and acting early, in low-stakes ways. By the time something reaches a formal threshold, the muscles are already warm. 

In a culture of active bystandership people collectively know that some people need to lose their jobs.  They know that extreme behaviours poison any workplace culture.  They learn that reporting such behaviours will be supported by most others.  That collective responsibility is key and supports an individual to report as opposed to a non-active bystander culture where reporting is misperceived as a ‘dirty thing.’

Third, it reframes authority. In passive cultures, responsibility is vertically outsourced: “someone senior will deal with it.” Active bystandership distributes moral ownership horizontally. When responsibility is shared, escalation feels like completion of a collective process, not an individual act of defiance.

Fourth, it increases trust in the system. Reporting rises when people believe something will actually happen and that they won’t be punished for caring. Active bystandership makes informal responses visible, which signals that the organisation takes harm seriously. Formal reporting then looks like a continuation of care, not shouting into the abyss.

Finally, it interrupts the myth that “nothing serious is happening.” Small interventions become patterns. Patterns create evidence. Evidence legitimises reporting. Harm that was once ambiguous becomes something nameable and reportable.

So increased reporting is not a failure signal. It’s a sign that people feel safer, more responsible, and less alone. Like installing better lighting in a room, you don’t create more dust, you simply make what was already there visible, and therefore actionable.

The classic social science experiments are basically a map of what happens before an active bystandership culture exists—and why reporting is so rare in its absence.

Let’s now apply some of the classic early social science experiments to help explain why more people report when you purposely build active bystandership cultures. 

Start with Stanley Milgram (1961). His obedience studies showed that ordinary people will defer to authority even when it conflicts with their moral instincts. The deeper lesson is not cruelty, but role confusion. Participants outsourced responsibility upward: “The experimenter is in charge; therefore, I am not.” In organisations without active bystandership, formal reporting feels like stepping outside your role. A bystander culture does the opposite. It redraws the role boundary so moral responsibility sits with everyone, not just those with titles. Reporting increases because obedience no longer requires silence.

John Darley and Bibb Latané (1968), the bystander effect. Their work showed that the presence of others diffuses responsibility. Everyone waits for someone else to act, especially when the situation is ambiguous. Active bystandership attacks that ambiguity head-on. It trains people to name what they’re seeing early, reducing the “maybe it’s nothing” paralysis. Once ambiguity drops, diffusion collapses. Reporting rises because people no longer assume someone else will handle it.

Darley and Latané also identified pluralistic ignorance: individuals privately think something is wrong but assume others see it as acceptable. This is deadly for reporting. A bystander culture punctures that illusion. When people speak up informally, even briefly, it reveals shared concern. Reporting then feels socially supported rather than socially reckless.

Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment adds another layer. Harm escalated not because participants were uniquely malicious, but because roles, norms, and inaction created permission. Guards learned what was tolerated by what went unchallenged. Active bystandership rewrites the permission structure. Visible interruption communicates limits. Reporting increases because people see that the system has edges, not endless tolerance.

Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments matter here too. People knowingly gave wrong answers to avoid social isolation. Silence protects belonging. Active bystandership changes which behaviour earns belonging. When speaking up is rewarded with respect rather than exclusion, conformity works in favour of reporting instead of against it.

Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement ties it all together. People deactivate their moral self-regulation through mechanisms like displacement of responsibility (“I was just following procedure”) or minimising harm. Active bystandership keeps moral language alive in everyday interactions. Harm stays morally important. Respect becomes the dominant norm, and reporting becomes a moral continuation, not a dramatic escalation.

Put together, these experiments show a bleak reality that human’s default to silence under authority, ambiguity, diffusion, conformity, and disengagement. A culture of active bystandership doesn’t fight human nature; it redesigns the social environment so our very human tendencies, imitation, norm-following, shared responsibility, start producing action instead of silence. In that environment, official reporting doesn’t spike because people have changed. It spikes because the system finally works with how people actually behave in the real world.

I know that its bad news that sells the books and the news stories.  I also know that a focus on the bad stories seldom leads to change.  When we focus more on the healthy majority and normalise what has been misperceived as bad and not normal, we help people to speak up both early but also to report harm through official processes.  A good thing surely.