Jeffrey Nagelbush forwarded something from (I believe) _The Chronicle of
Higher Education_ about Ted Kaczynski's participation in a study by Henry
Murray at Harvard. I wrote the following this morning while reading the
original article published in _The Atlantic Monthly_
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There is an article in the most recent issue of _The Atlantic Monthly_ by
Alston Chase entitled "Harvard and the making of the Unabomber" (June 2000,
Vol. 285, No. 6, pp. 41-44, 46-50, 52-56, 58-59, 62-65). Ted Kaczynski (the
"Unabomber") murdered three people and wounded over twenty with mail bombs
sent from 1978 to 1995. His main targets were those he felt represented the
technological and scientific elite, whom he felt were reducing the rest of
us to mere cogs in a technological machine. According to Chase, during and
soon after Kaczynski's undergraduate years at Harvard University, he
"began to put together a theory to explain his unhappiness and anger.
Technology and science were destroying liberty and nature. 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." (p. 63)
In this article, Chase tried to make the argument that a significant
influence on Kaczynski's actions was his participation, as an
undergraduate, in a study performed by the psychologist Henry Murray.
Murray, along with Christiana Morgan, is perhaps most famous for developing
the Thematic Apperception Test (published in 1935). During the late 1950s
and early 1960s, he and his co-investigators performed a study in which
they looked at Harvard undergraduate's reactions under stress: "Murray
subjected his unwitting students, including Kaczynski, to intensive
interrogation--what Murray himself called 'vehement, sweeping, and
personally abusive" attacks, assaulting his subject's egos and
most-cherished ideals and beliefs" (p. 42).
Although the study contained many components and continued over the course
of three years, the focus of the study was a situation that took place
during the second year in which the participants were given a kind of
"stress test." First, the participants wrote essays on their "personal
philosophy of life." They also wrote autobiographies in which they were
asked to reveal very intimate details (including sexual fantasies). They
then were asked to debate their views with another person (this event was
filmed). This other person, however, was a confederate who was instructed
to aggressively attack the participant's ideas. This verbal attack was so
severe that many participants became enraged. For example, twenty-five
years after the study had been completed, one participant recalled:
"I remember him attacking me, even insulting me, for my values, or for
opinions I had expressed in my written material, and I remember feeling
that I could not defend these ideas, that I had . . . not intended for them
to be the subject of a debate... I remember being shocked by the severity
of the attack, and I remember feeling helpless to respond.... So what I
seem to remember are feelings (bewilderment, surprise, anger, chagrin)
sensations (the bright lights used for the filming, the discomfort of the
arrangements) reactions (how could they have done this to me; what is the
point of this? They have deceived me, telling me there was going to be a
discussion, when in fact there was an attack)." (p. 59)
For many participants, this "discussion" was a very distressing and even
traumatic event. And it did not stop there: "During the year following this
session each student was called back for several 'recall' interviews and
sometimes was asked to comment on the movie of himself being reduced to
impotent anger by the interrogator" (p. 56).
This is a study that, it should be obvious, would be considered unethical
today by any institutional review board. Chase proposed that it could have
had strong effects on a young and immature undergraduate such as Kaczynski
(who was only 16 years old when he entered Harvard). Chase argued that this
study, along with what he was learning at Harvard in his general-education
courses, represented a turning point in Kaczynski's life. He argued that
the beginnings of Kaczynski's belief that modern technological and
scientific society is evil (and that it should be forcibly destroyed) was
determined, in part, by his participation in the Murray study:
"When, soon after [the end of the Murray study], Kaczynski began to worry
about the possibility of mind control, he was not giving vent to paranoid
delusions. In view of Murray's experiment, he was not only rational but
right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing
accomplices in an experiment that had treated human beings as unwitting
guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally. Here is a powerful logical
foundation for Kaczynski's latterly expressed conviction that academics, in
particular scientists, were thoroughly compromised servants of 'the
system', employed in the development of techniques for the behavioral
control of populations." (p. 63)
An interesting thesis, but arguable. Regardless of whether or not Chase
convinces you, the article is one that might prove very useful in class
discussions about the ethics of psychological research.
Jeff
--
Jeffry P. Ricker, Ph.D. Office Phone: (480) 423-6213
9000 E. Chaparral Rd. FAX Number: (480) 423-6298
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Scottsdale, AZ 85256-2626
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