Ted Kaczynski, who went on to become the Unabomber, was a subject in one of Professor Henry A. Murray’s experiments at Harvard

NEED TO KNOW

• Henry A. Murray was a Harvard psychologist known for his groundbreaking “personology” theories and tests
• In 1959, Murray conducted an experiment, which several experts now consider unethical, involving 22 Harvard undergraduate students — including Ted Kaczynski
• Kaczynski later moved to a remote Montana cabin and became the Unabomber

Henry A. Murray was a psychologist and professor at Harvard University who tested Ted Kaczynski — before he became the Unabomber.

Murray became known for his “personology” personality theory, which “examines individuals through physiological, psychoanalytical and social lenses,” according to EBSCO. He also co-created the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) with psychoanalyst Christiana Morgan, joined the Harvard psychology faculty and served as director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic from 1928 until 1937.

From 1959 to 1962, Murray conducted several psychological experiments on Harvard students that are now controversial because of their unfocused goals, intensity and use of deception.

One of the students who participated in the study was Ted Kaczynski, who was in his second year as an undergraduate student at the time, per History.com. Kaczynski ended up spending an estimated 200 hours as part of the study, per The Washington Post.

The experiment involving Kaczynski later became a topic of discussion when he was arrested in 1996 for being the Unabomber. Over the course of 17 years, Kaczynski terrorized the U.S. by sending mail and package bombs across the country, killing three people and injuring 23 others. He pleaded guilty to all charges in 1998 and received several consecutive life terms in prison. He died by suicide in prison in June 2023.

The Netflix movie Unabomber, which hit the streamer on Sept. 25, sheds light on Kaczynski’s life and how he transformed “from 16-year-old Harvard prodigy into the infamous Unabomber,” per the description. The movie specifically hones in on his relationship with Murray and speculates on how his experiment may have affected Kaczynski’s future.

Here’s everything to know about Henry A. Murray and what happened to him after he met Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber.

Who was Henry A. Murray?

Murray was born and raised in New York City before moving to Massachusetts and attending Harvard University, where he graduated with a history degree in 1911, according to EBSCO. He continued his education at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York and earned a medical degree in 1919.

Beginning in 1925, Murray began developing an interest in psychiatry, psychology and the study of personality. He went on to earn his doctorate degree in 1927 and started working as an instructor at his alma mater, Harvard, the following year.

From 1928 to 1937, he served as the assistant director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic where he researched and wrote theories about “personology,” which includes “studying individual life histories to find the main themes, internal drives, and outside factors that influence personality formation,” according to Harvard Magazine.

However, Murray later became known for the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), which he co-created with Christiana Morgan. TAT is a psychological test where people look at black-and-white pictures and share their own story about what they believe is going on in the photo to allow doctors to gain a better understanding of the person’s hidden personality traits and thoughts.

Murray temporarily left Harvard to work for the U.S. government during World War II, monitoring brainwashing tactics done by the military and developing personality tests for employees, per The Atlantic. After the war, he returned to Harvard at the Department of Social Relations where he specifically focused on personality in society, relationships and mythology. He remained at the university until retiring in 1962.

How did Murray know Kaczynski?

During his time at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, Murray conducted what some experts now deem unethical experiments where he studied how 22 Harvard undergraduate students handled extreme stress.

At the same time, Kaczynski was studying mathematics after enrolling at Harvard at just 16 years old in 1958. In the midst of his sophomore year in 1959, Kaczynski came across the study that needed volunteers and decided to participate.

He joined the experiment alongside 21 of his classmates, but he was allegedly unaware it would take place over the course of 200 hours and three years, according to Psychology Today.

However, unlike what the Netflix film portrays, there is no evidence that Murray personally recruited Kaczynski, taught him or that the two had any sort of personal relationship beyond subject and researcher.

What kind of tests did Murray perform on Kaczynski?

Murray’s controversial experiment, which began in 1959, was called “Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men.”

The study was intended to explore how extreme psychological stress affects someone’s personality and was specifically inspired by Murray’s work during the war, per The Atlantic.

At the beginning of the experiment, all 22 male candidates were given instructions to write a detailed personal essay where they wrote about their philosophy on life — which included topics from worldviews to sexual fantasies, per CBS News.

After the participants submitted their in-depth essays, they were seated in front of bright lights and wired to electrodes to face intense interrogation by Murray’s team members. The professor himself wrote that his participants were subject to “vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive” attacks in which interrogators threatened each candidate’s most valued beliefs, according to The Guardian.

“At first the questions were asked in a quiet, sympathetic, conciliatory manner, to invite confidence,” Murray and his colleagues wrote in a report, per The Atlantic. “After a few minutes, however, the examiner worked up to a crescendo in a dramatic fashion. … When an inconsistency appeared, he raised his voice and lashed out at the candidate, often with sharp sarcasm. He might even roar, ‘You’re a liar.’ ”

The participants then had to watch the recorded interrogation several times and discuss it. Kaczynski spent around 200 hours and the rest of his three years at Harvard participating in the experiment, according to The Washington Post.

“It’s clearly unethical and violates all of the main ethical principles for psychologists as promulgated by the American Psychological Association,” Nigel Barber, Ph.D, an evolutionary psychologist, told History.com. “Subjects were incompletely informed about the nature of the experiment [and] were tricked, or coerced, into remaining in the experiment.”

He continued, “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.”

Did Murray’s tests play a role in Kaczynski becoming the Unabomber?

Kaczynski eventually graduated from Harvard in 1962, and went on to attend the University of Michigan for both a master’s degree and Ph.D in mathematics. After graduating, he pivoted toward education and became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Just a few years later in 1971, Kaczynski moved to an isolated cabin in Montana where he lived without electricity or running water. During his time in the cabin, Kaczynski attempted to become self-sufficient but also started to feel resentful toward technology and anyone industrializing society.

Beginning in 1978, Kaczynski mailed or hand-delivered bombs wrapped in packages to people and companies he felt were destroying the environment. Kaczynski killed three people and injured 23 others.

His identity remained unknown until 1995 when he forced national newspapers to publish his 35,000-word manifesto, called “Industrial Society and Its Future.” Kaczynski’s brother, David, ultimately turned him in when his wife Linda noted the style of writing was very similar to his brother’s letters, and Kaczynski was arrested on April 3, 1996.

While reviewing Kaczynski’s background, investigators noticed the three-year experiment — which Kaczynski referred to as “the worst experience” of his life, according to A&E.

Although Kaczynski noted his disdain for the experiment, there is no record of him directly crediting it with his beliefs or actions. However, several historians and psychologists have debated whether or not it had an effect on him and the extent it could have.

Philosopher Alston Chase, who wrote the 2003 book Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist, argued that the humiliation Kaczynski faced during formative years escalated the resentment and social alienation he was already feeling and helped “shape his anger and legitimize his wrath.”

“It was the confluence of two streams of development that transformed Ted Kaczynski into the Unabomber,” Chase posited in The Atlantic. “One stream was personal, fed by his anger toward his family and those who he felt had slighted or hurt him, in high school and college. The other derived from his philosophical critique of society and its institutions, and reflected the culture of despair he encountered at Harvard and later. The Murray experiment, containing both psychological and philosophical components, may well have fed both streams.”

Chase believed that the Murray experiment resulted in Kaczynski being able to “put together a theory to explain his unhappiness and anger.”

“Technology and science were destroying liberty and nature,” he theorized. “The system, of which Harvard was a part, served technology, which in turn required conformism. By advertising, propaganda, and other techniques of behavior modification, this system sought to transform men into automatons, to serve the machine.”

Meanwhile, other historians and psychologists have argued that the three-year experiment could not have solely or most directly caused Kaczynski to embark on a years-long bombing rampage against modern technology.

What happened to Henry A. Murray?

Murray died of pneumonia at his home in Cambridge, Mass., on June 23, 1988, per his obituary in The New York Times. He was 95 years old.

Murray left behind a complicated legacy, as he was remembered as both “one of the outstanding psychologists of his time,” as well as having developed a darker side of psychology during the infamous experiment with Kaczynski.

“He was one of a small number of leading theorists in the study of personality, and his work was known worldwide to psychologists and psychiatrists,” one of Murray’s former students and professor of psychology Dr. Robert Holt told The New York Times. “His contributions influenced several generations of professors and clinical practitioners.”

The Henry A. Murray Research Archive, which is a “multi-disciplinary research data archive and a national repository for data in the social sciences,” was founded at Radcliffe College in 1976, per Harvard.

The results of Murray’s study including Kaczynski were permanently sealed in order to “protect its confidentiality,” the Harvard Crimson reported in 2000.

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