Who Is Professor Henry Murray—and What’s His Connection to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski?

Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, was only 16 when he began studying mathematics at Harvard University in 1958. Within the year, he started partaking in a series of intensive personality tests, which he would later describe as “the worst experience" of his life.

Those tests, which he took from 1959 to 1962, have now fueled decades of debate over whether the experience contributed in any way to Kaczynski’s later radicalization and violence.   

Prominent Harvard psychologist and professor Henry A. Murray, played by Russell Crowe in Netflix's Unabomber movie, subjected volunteer students to deliberately confrontational interrogations that attacked their deeply held beliefs while their reactions were recorded, analyzed and played back to them. 

A decade after his participation, Kaczynski carried out a 17-year mail-bombing campaign across the U.S. that killed three people and injured 23 others, eventually earning him the nickname the Unabomber, which came from the FBI’s case code because of the the UNiversity and Airline BOMbing targets involved.

Kaczynski was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 30 years in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty to all federal charges against him.

Murray, who served as the director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, joined the university in the 1920s to study what motivated people under pressure. He became interested in stress, interrogation and emotional endurance at a time when the country was concerned about propaganda, brainwashing and psychological warfare.

The test he used on Kaczynski and 21 other students was meant to study interrogation techniques that could be used by national and other law enforcement officials. Murray started his tests by recruiting intellectual undergraduate students. 

Students were asked to write an essay that covered their own personal philosophies, beliefs and worldviews. Researchers later used the students’ own essays as ammunition against them. Murray reportedly instructed his team to belittle each student's ideals, while subjecting them to what he described as "vehement, sweeping and personally abusive" interrogations in brightly lit rooms while they were wired to electrodes. Afterwards, the students were forced to watch the footage back, sometimes repeatedly.

The goal was to measure how individuals responded to humiliation, stress and emotional pressure.

"It was clearly not ethical to do research and not to tell people, and especially to do the research where they hooked them up to electrodes," Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, pioneer of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, told Fox News Digital. "I mean, now I understand what they were trying to do to see if the heart rate, blood pressure and all that would increase. So they got some measures—some hard measures—but evidently this was allowed over at Harvard and the way Murray played it, this was OK."

Kaczynski alone spent 200 hours being subjected to the testing. He stopped undergoing the testing in 1962, the same year Murray retired.

Murray, even after his death, continues to have a massive effect and wide reach on how researchers study personality today, and what the public knows about personalities in general.

In the 1930s, he and researcher Christiana Morgan developed the Thematic Apperception Test, a set of picture cards that challenge people to invent a story. The process of the TAT test reveals more about their psychological states than their responses to direct questions do. It’s a test that’s still used today and was also used on Kaczynski and other test subjects during the 1959 study.

Murray additionally pioneered longitudinal studies, meaning that investigators followed their subjects after their testing to determine if their initial results ever changed and why or how. The practice continues to be widely used today and was celebrated during the 1976 opening of the Murray Research Center, which is dedicated to longitudinal research, particularly on women.

The center still holds research developed at Harvard, including Murray’s data on Kaczynski. However, the center sealed data from the study on Kaczynski in 2000, four years after Kaczynski was arrested. 

"We have a very strong policy of maintaining the confidentiality of people who participate in studies archived here," then-Murray Center Director Annemette Sorensen said at the time. "This particular file has been permanently removed, with the reason being that we cannot protect its confidentiality anymore."

After Kaczynski’s arrest, investigators focused significant energy looking at Murray’s experiments on the teenage Kaczynski and whether Murray’s tests were ethical or had a lasting impact on its subjects. 

Burgess said she did not believe Murray was treating his subjects fairly and that he violated a string of modern ethical standards. However, his research didn’t violate any conduct codes that governed psychological research at the time.

His study reportedly fell under the Nuremberg Code of research ethics which were established at the end of World War II at the Nuremberg Trials.

Burgess believes the overall experiment was detrimental to its participants.

"To call them names, derogatory names, or to say that their work wasn't worthwhile, these were students,” she said. “Their whole being, at that particular point in their development, is academics and knowledge. They were being demeaned for that, or devalued for that in this critical time."

Although the effects of Murray’s tests have been debated, there has been no direct correlation between Kaczynski’s involvement in the study and his actions later in life as the Unabomber. 

“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," evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber told History.com. "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.”

Murray died in 1988 of pneumonia at age 95.