Psychological Safety

Psychological safety is the interpersonal-climate condition in which participants feel able to take risks, admit uncertainty, perform imperfectly, and ask questions without fearing negative social consequences. The term was formalized by Amy Edmondson in *Administrative Science Quarterly* and extended in her book *The Fearless Organization*. In Role-Play specifically, a psychological-safety container is a precondition for real engagement — participants who do not trust the container perform defensively, opt out, or engage only at a superficial level that defeats the activity's purpose. Psychological safety extends beyond Role-Play to any activity that requires participants to take interpersonal risk: Fishbowl's inner-ring participation, Peer Review's exposure of own work, Structured Debate's counter-instinct argument.