>And subjects who are just trying to follow the tasks as given to them are sort of washing their hands of the outcomes

Hence why large organizations commonly compartmentalize things to the point that people don't realize they are working on an orphan crushing machine.

Or, they actually do have an intuition of the real objective and they skip steps to more efficiently skip to the outcome.

See also: Those episodes in Star Wars Andor when they were in the prison colony working on the *SPOILER ALERT* death star components