WHEN a workplace ignores minor safety shortcuts, workers slowly accept unsafe acts as normal. In high-risk industries, we call this the normalisation of deviance – a dangerous psychological drift where something completely unacceptable quietly becomes standard practice simply because “everyone else is doing it and nothing has gone wrong yet”.
Human psychology does not change just because we step out of an office and onto a grass field. When over 25,000 football fans turned Kuala Lumpur’s Dataran Merdeka into an open-air stadium for the 2026 FIFA World Cup final, we saw that exact same systemic hazard play out on a massive public scale.
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