Is Psychology Responsible for the Unabomber?

According to the documentary Manhunt, unethical research by Henry Murray motivated terrorism.

Psychology professors like to expose unethical research. Harvard professor Henry Murray — a leading motivation researcher with a cavalier approach to ethics — passed under the radar. He even received two prestigious awards from the APA.

The Ethics Atrocity

U.S. intelligence services wanted to devise a procedure for “breaking” cold war Soviet spies so that they would be completely useless to their handlers. They hired Henry Murray to come up with an effective method of doing this.

Murray deceived Harvard psychology students into thinking that their participation would make a huge contribution to scholarship. He used personality tests to recruit emotionally vulnerable students and proceeded to undermine their egos. He did this by subjecting them to stressful interviews delving into their past. The recorded interviews were subsequently replayed to the subjects amid humiliating criticism by a trained confederate posing as a subject.

One of Murray's subjects was math major Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a the Unabomber.

Harvard and the Unabomber

This connection was described in a 2003 book, Harvard and the Unabomber (1), that was a source for the series, Manhunt (2004, available on Netflix) that repeats controversial claims about the impact of Murray's unethical research. It was only by viewing the series that I recently became aware of this fascinating book but better late than never.

To summarize, the argument is made that the brilliant, but troubled, math major was turned from a sweet and precocious kid into an angry terrorist by his research experiences. Kaczynski was certainly extremely angry about his three years of deliberate psychological abuse in Murray's lab. This anger motivated his willingness to blow up complete strangers in a quest for revenge upon universities and symbols of the Industrial Revolution (that Kaczinski blamed for turning people into mindless rule-following automatons who obeyed authority figures like bosses and researchers).

By tolerating abusive research procedures, did Harvard University create a terrorist?

Can We Blame Harvard for the Unabomber?

Blaming Harvard for the Unabomber is going too far for several different reasons. The first is that we know far too little about the prediction of individual behavior to make any such claim. Moreover, he showed early signs of social difficulties that were subsequently attributed to paranoid schizophrenia.

Another issue is that Kaczinski complained bitterly about his own lifelong betrayal by family and acquaintances that fit the mold of his experiences with Murray. Whether he truly was a victim in this sense is debatable but his life certainly offers no scarcity of supportive material, that would have been exaggerated by his paranoid tendencies.

So, if he had never met Henry Murray, his life might conceivably have played out similarly. His much-discussed alienation from modern life was not peculiar to the Unabomber but was common amongst other Harvard students and intellectuals of his day (1).

In his own mind, the Unabomber was a victim of betrayal by virtually everyone he knew — childhood friends, a young woman who rejected his romantic advances, his parents who sent him to Harvard at the age of 16 before he was emotionally mature enough to prosper there, the other Harvard students, and, finally, his brother who had supported him throughout his life. So although the Harvard experience as a research subject probably did not create the Unabomber, it certainly didn't help.

Ethical Principles

Blaming Harvard for the Unabomber may be a stretch. Yet, the fact that this case has been made by serious writers highlights the importance of ethics in research.

As an assault on the psychological integrity of the individual, Murray's research was clearly beyond the pale and ethically indistinguishable from the gruesome biomedical experiments perpetrated against concentration camp inmates by Josef Mengele and others (2).

Such atrocities precipitated the Nuremberg Code that is the guiding light for ethical research in all disciplines, including psychology.

Amongst its provisions are informed consent that Murray followed in a superficial manner. His participants did sign consent forms but were not informed of the true purpose of the research, much less of its goal of shattering the ego to the point that subjects would be unable to conduct a normal work life (whether as spies or as anything else). Consent may have been obtained but it was not fully informed.

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What Is a Scientific Model?

Although participants were free to leave whenever they wished, Murray rendered that unlikely through a deliberate grooming process where they were led to believe that their participation had an important scientific objective. Participants were paid and Kaczinski likely stayed on because he needed the money. Murray initially lied about the length of the study stating that the commitment was for a single year.

Under current ethical rules, the use of deception requires full debriefing so that the subjects are disabused of any misleading information used by the researcher. Apparently, this was not done. and could not have been done, if the research was classified, that seems likely given that the lead researcher had a security clearance.

Of course, the central ethical lapse was ignoring the principle that no permanent harm should be done to participants (the right of nonmaleficence). If such harm is done, an Institutional Review Board would have to establish that the benefits of the research greatly outweigh the harm to the subjects. In this case, given that the research was of zero value to science, this bar would not have been met.

Murray's research could not be conducted today. That begs the question of why the APA has not stripped Murray posthumously of his awards. These now seem as absurd as Yasser Arafat getting the Nobel Peace Prize.