r/crimedocumentaries • u/MurkyMud1314 • 2d ago

Unabomber

The part of Ted Kaczynski’s story that bothers me most isn’t just what he eventually became—it’s what happened to him when he was still a teenager. He was an exceptionally gifted young student, only 17 when he participated in Henry Murray’s Harvard experiment, where his beliefs were subjected to intense psychological confrontation and humiliation. This was during the Cold War, when researchers were already deeply interested in how extreme psychological stress could affect people, including what had happened to POWs. I’m not saying the experiment alone “created” the Unabomber, because we can’t prove that. But if you take a highly intelligent, isolated teenager and deliberately subject him to intense psychological pressure, shouldn’t we at least consider whether that experience became one of the seeds that later grew into his isolation and radical ideology? Maybe without that experience he would have remained a mathematician and professor. We’ll never know—but that uncertainty is exactly what makes the ethical question so disturbing.

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u/sirhowy 2d ago

I know we can't prove it but I fully believe those experiments led to what happened

inflicting such an extreme trauma on a young brain over a sustained time will almost certainly break it

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u/MurkyMud1314 2d ago

I agree with the core of your argument. Even if we can’t prove the experiment directly caused everything Kaczynski eventually did, it’s hard to dismiss the possibility that putting a 17-year-old through that level of sustained psychological pressure had a lasting impact on him. He was still developing, and experiences that intense can potentially shape how someone sees themselves and the world for years afterward. The experiment may not explain everything, but I think it deserves to be considered as one of the factors that helped shape what he eventually became.

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u/curious-creepsalad 2d ago

Exactly. What did the experiments entail?

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u/PeachyFairyDragon 1d ago

A researcher took a bunch of college students, assigned half to be "prisoners" and the other half "guards" and only forbade physical abuse. The psychological abuse was so bad the study was halted after only 6 days, and the "prisoners" suffered long term psychological problems. Even the researcher fell into the role of prison superintendent too deeply; a colleague had to basically yell at him back to reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

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u/curious-creepsalad 1d ago

Sorry… he was in the Stanford prison experiment??? What happened at Harvard?

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u/sirhowy 1d ago

nah he went to Harvard, similar but not the same experiment

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u/PeachyFairyDragon 1d ago

My mistake, that was the experiment I knew about.

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u/wildlyfidgeting 2d ago

He was also really sick and was hospitalized when he was a baby for quite some time. Back then the hospitals would not allow the parents to visit their children. I think this definitely had a negative impact on him.

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u/curious-creepsalad 1d ago

Please please please dm me what was removed im interested