It's the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

Stand up, stand up.

You've been sitting way too long.

Welcome to the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. My name is Steve Scrovan along with my

trustee co-host David Feldman. You feeling trusty today David?

Yes I am. We're depending on you and we also have the man of the

the hour Ralph Nader. Hello Ralph. Hello everybody this one will really come

home to you listeners. I believe you're right Ralph a few years ago executives working for

Takata a company that makes airbags knew that the product they made for millions of

cars could possibly explode like a hand grenade and decapitate the driver or the passenger

of a car.

Yet these executives took no action.

Many of us remember the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986 where engineers knew that faulty

seals called o rings were prone to snap in cold weather. When they alerted the higher

ups they were told to be quiet. These are just a couple of examples among many where people do nothing despite their better judgment.

This effect, called the bystander effect, is what our guest Dr. Catherine Sanderson focuses her research on. Her most recent book,

Why We Act, Turning Bystanders into Moral Rebels, examines the factors that lead people

under certain circumstances not to act in the face of a potential emergency and we're going to talk to her about what we can do to encourage people who might otherwise stay silent to go against the crowd, speak up and take action. We will, as always, take some time to check in

with our corporate crime reporter Russell Mokieber, but first let's discover how we ourselves can become moral rebels.

David?

Professor Catherine Sanderson is the chair of psychology at Amherst College.

In 2012, she was named one of the country's top 300 professors by the Princeton Review.

...