AO3

• Evidence to support the legitimate authority is Tarnow's study (2000)

  He studied data from a US National Transportation Safety Board reviewing all serious of aircraft accidents in the US between 1978 and 1990 where a black box was available, and where flight crew actions were a contributing factor in the crash

  Tarnow found excessive dependence on the captain's authority. This suggests that legitimate authority can be seen in the real world
• Agentic state or just plain cruelty?

  • One common belief among social scientists is that he had detected signs of cruelty among his participants who had used the situation to express their sadistic impulses. This belief was subsequently given substance by the stanford prison experiment
  • This suggest that, for some people, obedience might be explained in terms of agentic shift, but for others, 'obedient behaviour' may be due to some more burdenmental desire to inflict harm on others