[4] This led to more research by psychologists and some surprising findings (notably by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo) on human behavior in the context of obedience and authority bias.
A Report on the Banality of Evil[4] which focused on Adolf Eichmann, a German-Austrian Nazi soldier who was responsible for the deportation of Jews to extermination camps and thus played a major role in the Holocaust.
The idea has been expanded to study people's behaviour in areas as diverse as organisational behavior and mental health to name a few.
[2] Early spiritual leaders such as the Buddha and Confucius also spoke about moral behaviour in their discourses although they were more prescriptive in nature.
[15] A major driver for modern research on moral blindness is purported to be post World War II sentiments towards people such as Adolf Eichmann (responsible for genocide under the Nazi regime during the Holocaust).
"[20] To most people's surprise, 65% of the subjects from the original study went ahead to pull a switch that would have administered the maximum of 450 volts.
[21] Later in 1971, Zimbardo in his Stanford Prison Experiment studied showed how "good people behave in pathological ways that are alien to their nature".
The experiment was designed to see how far subjects would go to internalise their roles and obey external orders and later raised some ethical concerns about the nature of the study itself.
In his research, Bandura argued that moral disengagement could arise out of various forces (individual, situational, or institutional) along with mechanisms such as diffusion of responsibility and disconnected division of tasks could lead to immoral behaviour.
A major area of application has been in the field of management and organisational behaviour with research looking at a wide range of topics such as corporate transgressions, business ethics, and moral disengagement at work.