What Happened to Ted Kaczynski at Harvard?

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

After investigators discovered in 1996 that the former child prodigy had become a reclusive murderer responsible for a 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 more disturbing aspects of the experiment began.

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 measure how the students responded to intense psychological stress.

“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 remains an influential figure in the history of personality psychology, and the Thematic Apperception Test, which he developed with Christiana Morgan, is still used today.

However, his legacy has been complicated by scrutiny of the study, in which Kaczynski was one of the subjects. The experiment drew renewed attention after Kaczynski’s 1996 arrest, as details of his early life emerged. Murray died in 1988. Kaczynski was found dead by suicide in his cell on June 10, 2023.

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 in 1947 following the Nuremberg Doctors' Trials—which, though not legally binding in the United States, helped shape later ethical standards for human-subject research.

After several infamous cases of human experiments gone awry—most notably, Stanley Milgram’s study in which participants were led to believe they were administering increasingly severe and potentially dangerous electric shocks to another person——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.”

Although it’s now widely accepted that experiments like Murray’s are unethical and may cause harm to participants, there’s no established causal connection 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 given a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia by a court-appointed psychiatrist before his 1998 trial and that young adulthood is often the time when schizophrenia first emerges. 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.”