theodore kaczynski harvard experiment

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1959–1962: “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber”

Dr. Henry Murray, chairman of Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations had devised a screening test for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor of the CIA) to assess the suitability of applicants for the secret service; it tested an applicant’s ability to withstand harsh interrogation. In 1950, Murray led a Harvard team of psychologists in a series of 3-year experiments titled “Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.” The experiments were conducted on twenty-two Harvard undergraduates; the intent was to measure how the students reacted under stress. One of the subjects in these exceedingly stressful, ethically indefensible confrontational experiments was 16-year old Theodore Kaczynski.

The future Unabomber’s code name in the experiment was “Lawful”; but the experiment was anything but lawful. In fact, it was sadistic. The intent of the experiment was to undermine the students’ sense of self-worth by subjecting them to intense aggressive verbal attack. Murray himself described the intensive interrogation the students were subjected to as ‘vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive’ attacks that assaulted the subjects’ egos and most cherished ideals and beliefs. (Alston Chase. The Atlantic , 2000)

In his follow-up book, Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (2003), Dr. Alston Chase, an alumnus of Harvard with a Princeton doctorate in philosophy, whose college and graduate school education and early professorial career paralleled that of Ted Kaczynski with whom he corresponded in 1998, provides further details about Murray’s assaultive experiment which deliberately undermined the student’s psychological well-being. He writes that after his article in The Atlantic , the Harvard files regarding Henry Murray’s experiments were “permanently removed” from the Murray Research Center (named in his honor). However, Dr. Chase had already examined these files in preparation for his book.

The undergraduates were asked to write an autobiographical essay describing their most personal beliefs and aspirations, as well as their deepest sexual desires. They were taken individually to an interrogation room with a one-way mirror where they were strapped to a chair with electrodes attached to monitor their physiological responses. Each student was subjected to lengthy, abusive harangues by a law school student who had been given a detailed psychological battle plan by Murray. The students were deceived, ridiculed, and humiliated. In essence, students were put through a brutal “ version of the third degree ”, otherwise known as torture. Over the next three years, the volunteers were repeatedly humiliated, verbally assaulted and sexually debased. The entire proceeding was filmed from behind a one-way mirror, and each victim was required to relive his humiliation on film.

Chase concludes that Kaczynski and his classmates unwittingly served not only Murray’s debased research methods but also his “ sadism, sexual fantasies, desire for power, anger, need to explode and cause pain .” Dr. Murray’s own interpersonal dynamics included a predilection to sadism. His long-term (40-year) sadomasochistic love affair with Christiana Morgan, his colleague and co-inventor of the Thematic Apperception Test , is documented.

Chase notes that many of the subjects in Murray’s experiments reported feelings of anger, nihilism, and alienation; and several remained haunted by the experience even 25 years later. He analyzes the Unabomber’s precepts and shows how these were an extension of his educational experience at Harvard. The mixture of brutal emasculation and ethical confusion that Dr. Kaczynski experienced at Harvard would have lifelong effects. Disillusioned with the scientific method, one lacking in ethical values and treated him as a guinea pig, coupled with his anger at his parents for pushing him into that vortex, generated a smoldering anger in Kaczynski which erupted in violence, ultimately turning him into the murderous vengeful “Unabomber.” Ted Kaczynski’s brother David concurs. In 2010, he wrote in the Times Union :

My brother was a victim before he victimized others — and in this he is hardly unique. Those who victimized him exercised cruelty with impunity. . . What was done to my brother at Harvard should never be allowed to happen again. Our best insurance against inflicting harm on others — as was done to Ted and by Ted — is to avoid objectifying human beings, and to approach others with compassion.

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What Happened to Ted Kaczynski at Harvard?

By: Brian Dunleavy

Updated: June 12, 2023 | Original: May 25, 2018

Before Ted Kaczynski became the infamous Unabomber, he was a gifted, 16-year-old student at Harvard University. Kaczynski may have been precocious in his intellect, but he was also impressionably young—and it was at Harvard where Kaczynski would be recruited to take part in a three-year-long psychological experiment.

After investigators discovered in 1996 that the former youthful genius became a reclusive murderer responsible for a horrific series of bombings that killed three people and injured 23, they took an interest in the three-year experiment that Kaczynski later described as “the worst experience" of his life.

Kaczynski entered Harvard in 1958 and, one year later, was tapped by psychologist Henry A. Murray to take part in a study exploring the effects of stress on the human psyche—a popular area of research during the Cold War . The experiment enlisted 22 Harvard students to write a detailed essay in which they summarized their worldview and personal philosophy. Then the harsh aspects of the experiment began.

The study clearly violated today's ethical standards.

After submitting their essays, each of the students was seated in front of bright lights, wired to electrodes and subjected to what Murray himself described as “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” interrogations, during which members of his research team would attack the student subjects’ ideals and beliefs, as gleaned from their essays. The goal was to assess the value of interrogation techniques used by law enforcement and national security agents in the field.

“It’s clearly unethical and violates all of the main ethical principles for psychologists as promulgated by the American Psychological Association,” says Nigel Barber, Ph.D., an evolutionary psychologist who writes a regular column called “The Human Beast: Why We Do What We Do” for Psychology Today and is the author of several books on human behavior.

“Subjects were incompletely informed about the nature of the experiment [and] were tricked, or coerced, into remaining in the experiment. Given that the procedures were designed to ‘break’ enemy agents and render them so damaged that they would be operationally useless, it is reasonable to expect that they would have the same consequences for vulnerable young people who did not have specialized training to resist interrogation.”

Murray is still considered an important researcher and clinician in the field of psychology, and his personality assessments remain a fundamental part of psychological evaluations to this day.

However, his legacy (he passed away in 1988) has been tarnished somewhat by this study, in which Kaczynski was one of the subjects. In fact, the study drew a lot of negative attention in the aftermath of the Unabomber’s arrest as details of his early life emerged. (Kaczynski was found dead, reportedly by suicide , in his cell on June 10, 2023.)

Earlier research standards were set at the Nuremberg Trials.

Experiments such as Murray’s almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed today under current ethical standards for research—but at the time, it wasn't considered a violation of any code of research conduct.

According to Barber, researchers at the time of Murray’s experiment were governed by the Nuremberg Code of research ethics—established at the Nuremberg Trials shortly after the end of World War II —which, though not legally binding, still serves as the basis for ethical standards in research today.

After several infamous cases of human experiments gone awry—most notably, Stanley Milgram’s study in which participants were coerced into believing that they had administered fatal electrocutions to others who had failed to follow their instructions—the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1982 published detailed guidelines on how research should be conducted called “Ethical Principles in the Conduct of Research with Human Subjects.”

Today, “all university research, including experiments on humans, must pass scrutiny of an Institutional Review Board or Ethical Review Panel,” Barber explains. “These [committees] pore over procedural details and may reverse an approval if ethical problems surface in the course of the research.”

No direct correlation made between experiment and later violence.

Although it’s now the widely held view that experiments like Murray’s are unethical and may cause harm to those who participate in them, there’s no direct correlation between Kaczynski’s involvement in the study and his actions later in life as the Unabomber.

“I think it is reasonable to identify this episode as approximately the time around which Kaczynski’s life began to unravel, [but] this might be coincidental,” notes Barber.

Barber points out that Kaczynski was later diagnosed with schizophrenia and that young adulthood is often the time when this illness strikes. But he was subsequently hired as an academic mathematician and, Barber says, "proved an able researcher."

“The Harvard experiment was stressful and stress aggravates the symptoms of schizophrenia. Otherwise, it would be a mistake to exaggerate the importance of this experience, or to see it as a major determinant of his anti-science and anti-technology political views," Barber says. "It was just one more personal grudge that he could fit into a paranoid narrative about how the world worked in general, and for him in particular.”

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• Experiments

The Harvard experiment and the Unabomber

It took the FBI more than 20 years to track down Ted, the man who patiently planted 16 bombs throughout that time in strategic locations. The name “Unabomber” stemmed from his methodology and his precise targets: “University and Airline Bomber”.

As the story goes, that investigation was one of the most expensive in the United States. However, it wasn’t until the arrival of criminalist agent James R. Fitzgerald that Kaczynski felt his nemesis closing in until he finally caught him . However, the general public was surprised to learn who was the person behind all those acts. No one understood why a well-recognized Harvard mathematics professor could move from academic distinction to criminality.

Schizophrenia, paranoia, and antisocial personality disorder were some of the diagnoses that tried to explain his behavior. These ideas sought to reassure the population and offer a reason to something that baffled the general public. However, various reports went out in 2003. These once again shocked all those who were still interested in the Unabomber case.

Embarrassment

Harvard's experiment on the unabomber, class of '62, an odd footnote to kaczynski's class reunion..

Posted May 25, 2012 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

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• During Ted Kaczynski’s sophomore year at Harvard in 1959, he was recruited for a psychological experiment that would last three years.
• The experiment Ted Kaczynski participated in at Harvard involved psychological torment and humiliation.
• For 18 years, using homemade explosive devices, Ted Kaczynski terrorized those he saw as agents of antihuman technology before his 1996 arrest.

The news that Ted Kaczynski was included in the 50th-anniversary alumni directory has roiled the class reunion. Better known via his nom de plume (or “guerre,” as he might have it) as the “Unabomber,” Kaczynski listed his occupation as “prisoner,” his awards as “eight life sentences” and his publication as his 2010 manifesto “Technological Slavery.” How and whether his responses to the class questionnaire should have been published has caused a lot of finger-pointing and reflection in Cambridge. But his crimes were no joke. Kaczynski’s letter bombs killed three people and maimed another 23.

For all the reporting about the 50th-anniversary reunion dustup, an odd twist to the Harvard Unabomber story has not been mentioned: During Kaczynski’s sophomore year at Harvard, in 1959, he was recruited for a psychological experiment that, unbeknownst to him, would last three years. The experiment involved psychological torment and humiliation , a story I include in my book Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century.

The Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress . Kaczynski’s anti-technological fixation and his critique itself had some roots in the Harvard curriculum, which emphasized the supposed objectivity of science compared with the subjectivity of ethics . Before his arrest, he demanded that The Washington Post and The New York Times publish a 35,000-word manifesto called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” a document that expressed his philosophy of science and culture.

Kaczynski believes that the Industrial Revolution was the font of human enslavement. “The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs,” he wrote. “Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system.” The only way out is to destroy the fruits of industrialization, to promote the return of “WILD nature,” in spite of the potentially negative consequences of doing so, he wrote.

After Harvard, Kaczynski earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan, then taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, after which he dropped out of society. For 18 years, using homemade explosive devices, he terrorized those he viewed as agents of antihuman technology, especially anyone associated with universities or airlines. By the time he was arrested at his remote Montana cabin in 1996, Kaczynski left behind a trail of mayhem.

The man who conducted the humiliation experiment was the brilliant and complex Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray. Though his fame has diminished since his death, Murray was among the most important scientists of his day, the pioneer of personality tests that are now a routine part of industrial management and psychological assessments. It is not too much to say that contemporary psychology would be far different without his contributions. (Full disclosure: Murray was a close friend and colleague of my father's, but we knew nothing of this experiment.)

Henry Murray was a native New York blueblood who became a Boston Brahmin. He attended the finest schools, Groton and Harvard, and earned an M.D. from Columbia and a doctorate in biochemistry from Cambridge University. He dropped medicine and natural science for psychology after reading Carl Jung, publishing a landmark work in 1938 called Explorations in Personality. Before World War II, the U.S. government asked him to do a psychological profile of Hitler, and during the war, he helped the Office of Strategic Services (later to become the CIA) to assess its agents. In the 1950s, Murray’s personality test, the thematic apperception test, or TAT, was used to screen Harvard students.

In yet another odd twist that shows why history is stranger than fiction, while Kaczynski was undergoing those humiliation experiments, a young Harvard researcher named Timothy Leary was beginning his research career on psychedelics. In 1960, Leary returned from a vacation in Mexico with a suitcase full of magic mushrooms. Murray himself is said to have supervised psychoactive drug experiments, including Leary’s. According to Alston Chase, author of Harvard and the Unabomber , Leary called Murray “the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation.”

These curious historical intersections remind us that, as William Faulkner put it in another context, “The past isn’t dead; it’s not even past.”

Jonathan D. Moreno, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Theodore J. Kaczynski

Theodore J. Kaczynski ’62 entered Harvard in the fall of 1958 at the age of 16 as a shy, Chicago-raised mathematics prodigy. Twenty years after he took his first class in the Yard, he would mail his first home-made pipe bomb.

Kaczynski, known in the media by his FBI code name “Unabomber,” has been described by the students who remembered him at the College as “shy” and “quiet.”

“He was a loner—he didn’t talk to anyone,” said Patrick S. McIntosh ’62, one of Kaczynski’s Eliot House suitemates. “He seemed to be okay to talk to at first, but then after a while he wouldn’t connect to anyone else.”

But the uncovering of his connection with a string of bombings that would kill three and injure 23 over 17 years, cementing his status among Harvard’s most infamous alumni, only complicated the memories of Ted Kaczynski for those who knew him in college. For the students he interacted with while at Harvard, Kaczynski had seemed a socially reserved genius, but showed no inclination to violent or revolutionary action.

“It’s just an opinion—but Ted was brilliant,” said Wayne B. Persons ’62, another Eliot suitemate. “I think it was a huge tragedy. He could have become one of the greatest mathematicians in the country. He wasn’t a domestic terrorist when I knew him.”

A RESERVED GENIUS

Kaczynski began his college years in the relative isolation of 8 Prescott Street, currently the Harvard College Writing Program building. Dean of Freshmen F. Skiddy von Stade Jr. ’38 initially began the Prescott housing to accommodate some of the most promising, precocious freshmen in a smaller, more intimate living space, according to an article published in the L.A. Times shortly after Kaczynski’s arrest in April 1996.

But the reality of Prescott as a low-rent housing option led to both a physical and social separation of Kaczynski from the Yard and its more well-to-do students. This isolation seemed to only reinforce Kaczynski’s asocial, serious nature—something that carried over to his move to Eliot N-43 the next year.

Kaczynski’s Eliot suite had formerly served as maids’ quarters before being converted into a room with one of the cheapest rates on campus, Persons explained.

“I didn’t have much money, and at that time, Harvard had different room rates for dormitories,” Persons said. “I went for the absolute bottom.”

Persons and other suitemates recalled Kaczynski holing up in his single, avoiding contact with the other six who shared N-43.

“He would just rush through the suite, go into his room, and slam the door,” McIntosh recalled. “And when we would go into his room there would be piles of books and uneaten sandwiches that would make the place smell.”

Both McIntosh and Persons remembered one of Kaczynski’s distinct rooming tics—playing his trombone late at night.

“And he liked bumping his chair on the wall of my room [while playing],” McIntosh said. “I think he was pretty good at it, just at times he had to tone it down.”

McIntosh recalled that Kaczynski would often eat in the corner of the dining hall, not talking to anyone.

“[We] tried to sit next to Ted to see what he’s like, but he would only sit there for five, 15 seconds, then just get up and go,” McIntosh said. “He would not have anything to do with us.”

But other students recalled Kaczynski being far less socially withdrawn.

John V. Federico ’62, a resident of Eliot House, recalled sitting at the same table with Kaczynski from time to time.

“He was very quiet, but personable,” Federico said. “He would enter into the discussions maybe a little less so than most...but he was certainly friendly. He was younger, and he seemed to be on the shy side, so you needed to make some effort to draw him in. But he could do that.”

Already somewhat distant from other students, Kaczynski seemed to have hinted to his suitemates of his future self-sufficient seclusion in Lincoln, Mont.

“I remember Ted explaining something once on Montana,” Persons said. “He said his father used to take him and his brother camping and taught him advanced outdoor survival skills, which may explain why he was able to live in Montana for so long successfully.”

BECOMING THE BOMBER

After graduating in 1962, Kaczynski chose graduate school and a university job, but only ten years after leaving Harvard he had physically isolated himself from the rest of the world, marking a transition that would set him on the path to the creation of the Unabomber.

Kaczynski earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan, becoming an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 before suddenly resigning two years later.

In 1971, he moved into a secluded cabin in Lincoln, Mont., intending to use survival skills to become self-sufficient. But the industrialization and development around his rural retreat would lead him to begin a string of mail bombings.

Over the course of more than a decade of investigation, the FBI dubbed the anonymous terrorist the “Unabomber,” a reference to his targeting of universities and airlines.

By 1995, Kaczynski outlined his call for revolution against industrial society in a 50-page essay, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” threatening further bombings if this “Unabomber Manifesto” remained unpublished.

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” Kaczynski wrote in the first line of the Manifesto, published anonymously in The Washington Post and The New York Times in September 1995.

After Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski, read the Manifesto, he began to suspect that his brother was the Unabomber. David Kaczynski turned samples of his brother’s other writings in to the FBI, leading to an arrest on April 3, 1996.

Kaczynski currently serves a life sentence without possibility of parole in a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo.

—Staff writer David Song can be reached at [email protected].

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