Ted Kaczynski created by Harvard Mind Experiments

Source link https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91721-oops

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab090310.mp3 Story on Ted about 4 minutes in.
> Be Careful What You Plan For

Transcript:

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:10 I'm Jad.

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:13 I'm Robert.

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:14 On this episode of Radio Lab four oops'. Starting with a tree.

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:25 Then we've got a goose that went ...

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:29 And an entire town that went ...

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:31 And a Harvard professor-

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:34 That really went oops.

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:34 Yeah.

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:35 Now, we should just say before we start oops can be a misleading term. Really what we're talking about here is something Greek.

Robert Krulwich: 00:04:43 Where you try hard to prevent one thing, and then you get exactly what you didn't want to get back at you.

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:48 Right, and our first story falls into that category. Back a few seasons ago, we were doing a show on deception, and we ended up talking with a professor named Ruben Gur.

Ruben Gur: 00:04:58 Yes? Hello?

Jad Abumrad: 00:04:59 Hi is this professor Gur?

Ruben Gur: 00:05:00 Yes, speaking.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:01 He's a psychiatrist that works at the University of Pennsylvania, and I'd called him to talk about his research on self deception.

Ruben Gur: 00:05:06 Self deception.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:07 It's fascinating stuff, and I'm not going to go into it now because somewhere along the way the conversation took a really weird turn.

No.

Ruben Gur: 00:05:14 Oh yeah.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:16 Get out.

Ruben Gur: 00:05:17 Yeah, yeah.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:17 It happened when he began to tell me about some studies.

Ruben Gur: 00:05:20 Strange studies-

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:22 Done by a ... What was the guys name?

Ruben Gur: 00:05:24 His name is hanging ... I don't remember. Hold on a second, Murray was his name.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:34 Henry Murray.

Robert Krulwich: 00:05:37 The reason we want to hear about Henry Murray is what?

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:40 What? I built it up. Don't you want to know more at this point?

Robert Krulwich: 00:05:41 Yeah, no. Tell me why.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:45 Okay, I'm going to let it unfold, because we were so interested in what Ruben Gur told us that we found the guy.

Alston Chase: 00:05:50 Hi.

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:51 How's it going?

Who knows a whole lot about professor Murray. His name is Alston Chase.

Alston Chase: 00:05:55 Very windy day today, isn't it?

Jad Abumrad: 00:05:57 He lives in a remote cabin in Montana, in the woods, in the foothills.

Alston Chase: 00:06:03 Professor Murray was a very prestigious scholar. He had been a professor of psychology at Harvard before the second World War. During the war, he went to work for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was the forerunner of the CIA.

Jad Abumrad: 00:06:19 A couple of years into his government service, says Alston, something happened that really spooked him and spooked the country.

Alston Chase: 00:06:26 During the Korean War-

Jad Abumrad: 00:06:29 There were some GI's, he said, who'd been captured in Korea, and afterwards-

Alston Chase: 00:06:33 After the Korean War-

Jad Abumrad: 00:06:34 ... they refused to come home.

Alston Chase: 00:06:35 ... they appeared to have betrayed their country.

Speaker 12: 00:06:39 Renounce their own country and disappeared behind red China's bamboo curtain.

Speaker 13: 00:06:43 Now, does anybody want to go home?

Speaker 14: 00:06:45 No.

Alston Chase: 00:06:46 The CIA and the military establishment was very much concerned that the communists had found techniques for brainwashing.

Jad Abumrad: 00:06:57 Murray and other psychiatrists in the government were charged with preparing those soldiers to resist that kind of brainwashing. Murray himself developed a style of interrogation.

Alston Chase: 00:07:07 Stressful interrogation was the term used.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:10 That the army could use on its pilots.

Ruben Gur: 00:07:12 Yeah, they developed this method of kidnapping them before they were sent onto mission.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:17 Then, says Ruben Gur, he'd run them through a battery of tests ...

Ruben Gur: 00:07:20 To see if they break, and if they didn't break then they were fine to fly.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:24 This kind of psychological training was almost a new front in the cold war. In the 1950s Murray is back at Harvard, and he's thinking of ways to fine tune his techniques, and this is where things get interesting.

Alston Chase: 00:07:37 He took a class of Harvard undergraduates, 20 some odd-

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:40 Sophomores mostly.

Alston Chase: 00:07:43 The students were told to write an autobiographical essay.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:45 Like a diary, and he told them, you know what-

Alston Chase: 00:07:47 Make it very personal.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:48 ... write your deepest thoughts in there.

Alston Chase: 00:07:50 Highest aspirations, and hopes-

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:52 And while you're at it, write about your sexual fantasies.

Robert Krulwich: 00:07:57 Quite a class.

Jad Abumrad: 00:07:57 Go ahead. After the students were done he said to them "Now I'm going to pair you up into groups of two."

Alston Chase: 00:08:01 To debate, or discuss, what they'd written.

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:05 Students were like, okay we'll share, no big deal. But-

Alston Chase: 00:08:11 They were duped. They were walked into this very brightly lit room-

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:17 Which turned out to be an interrogation room with a one way mirror.

Alston Chase: 00:08:19 ... put in a chair, strapped in, electrodes were attached to their arms, chest, their heart.

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:27 To measure stress basically.

Alston Chase: 00:08:29 They were also filming through the mirror.

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:32 Then, instead of a classmate in walked a total stranger.

Alston Chase: 00:08:36 Older man-

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:36 This guy was holding their essay. They didn't know it, but Murray had trained him-

Alston Chase: 00:08:40 To do everything he could to anger and humiliate the undergraduate.

Jad Abumrad: 00:08:45 He just tore them apart piece by piece.

Alston Chase: 00:08:49 Using the essay to mock the students aspirations, and thoughts. Then after this was done the students have to come back week after week to view themselves on film being humiliated.

Jad Abumrad: 00:09:07 That, to me, seems like the worst part. After they'd been humiliated, they had to watch themselves being humiliated over and over.

Alston Chase: 00:09:14 People became tearful, and miserable, and he was proud how he destroyed people.

Robert Krulwich: 00:09:19 What kind of a person is this?

Jad Abumrad: 00:09:22 Like why did he do it?

Robert Krulwich: 00:09:23 Yeah.

Alston Chase: 00:09:23 Why Murray did it, there are any one of a number of explanations and they all could be true. One is it was grant grabbing. He was getting money to do these things.

Jad Abumrad: 00:09:33 Also, this was the Cold War, he was fighting communism, maybe he thought it was justified.

Robert Krulwich: 00:09:37 Yeah, but he just said he was proud of this.

Jad Abumrad: 00:09:40 Well, it also happens to be the case that he was having an affair.

Alston Chase: 00:09:44 For about 30 years, with a woman not his wife, and they had a sexual relationship that border on, in fact was, sadomasochistic. In other words, Murray's interests in these was intensely personal.

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:00 Whatever the case, in those Harvard experiments there was one student who was just not prepared for any of it.

Ruben Gur: 00:10:06 His code name was Lawful.

Alston Chase: 00:10:08 They gave each of these students a code name.

Ruben Gur: 00:10:11 Because he was considered so conventional.

Alston Chase: 00:10:13 He was-

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:14 Really still just a boy.

Alston Chase: 00:10:15 Graduated high school at 16.

Ruben Gur: 00:10:16 Was living a thousand miles from home, two shirts and two trousers to his name.

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:21 And Lawful apparently was an especially lonely kid.

Ruben Gur: 00:10:24 The notes I found of Murray did refer specifically to Lawful's essay which he saw as highly alienated.

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:31 When Lawful walked into that room, sat across from that stranger-

Alston Chase: 00:10:35 The guy really made a job on him. He was young so he was barely growing a beard. The first thing that the guy tells him is what is this on your chin? Something trying to look like a beard.

Jad Abumrad: 00:10:47 Then the guy opens up Lawful's essay and lets him have it. Meanwhile, like all of the students Lawful had been hooked up to all of these stress monitors.

Alston Chase: 00:10:55 I analyzed his data compared to all the other participants, and he had far and away the strongest response physiologically.

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:03 You mean like his heart beat the fastest and all that?

Alston Chase: 00:11:05 Heart beat, everything through the roof.

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:12 Amazingly, this experiment went on for three years. Decades later, a lot of the subjects were still upset.

Ruben Gur: 00:11:19 Considered it one of the most traumatic experiences they'd had in their 20s.

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:23 Lawful never forgot it.

Ruben Gur: 00:11:25 That's right. He was resentful at the way he was treated at Harvard. He had nightmares about professor Murray after he left Harvard.

Robert Krulwich: 00:11:33 So what happened to this guy?

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:36 Well, he finished up his four years at Harvard, got his degree, then got a PhD in math. Then he began to teach math, and then he became a household name.

Robert Krulwich: 00:11:45 What do you mean?

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:46 Well, I mean this ...

Speaker 12: 00:11:48 The FBI raid began just after noon, in a remote mountainous area called Stemple Pass, about five miles outside the town of Lincoln, Montana.

Jad Abumrad: 00:11:56 Turns out that Lawful's real name-

Ruben Gur: 00:11:58 Theodore Kaczynski.

Jad Abumrad: 00:12:00 No?

Ruben Gur: 00:12:01 Oh yeah.

Jad Abumrad: 00:12:01 Get out.

Ruben Gur: 00:12:02 Yeah.

Speaker 12: 00:12:03 The FBI dubbed him the unabomber. In nearly 18 years he found targets all over the country.

Speaker 15: 00:12:09 His meticulously made bombs have killed three people and injured another 23.

Speaker 16: 00:12:13 Blew my arm off to the side like this, and the first thing I thought was why did they do that.

Jad Abumrad: 00:12:20 Do you think that this study had anything to do with Ted Kaczynski's subsequent very infamous acts?

Ruben Gur: 00:12:28 Well, I think he probably would have, if it hadn't been for that experiment he still probably would have been maybe reclusive, living somewhere in a cabin in Montana regardless. I think the evil twist was done there.

Jad Abumrad: 00:12:45 Years later while he was researching a book, Alston Chase corresponded with Kaczynski.

Alston Chase: 00:12:50 In one of his letters he mentioned that he participated in some psychological experiments conducted by professor Murray. Of course, I was very curious and I wrote it back "Can you tell me a little bit more about it?" And he said, "Well I don't know if you want to go into that can of worms."

Jad Abumrad: 00:13:19 Ruben Gur is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania and Alston Chase is the author of the book Harvard And The Making Of The Unabomber.

Heres one more, from Ben Zimmer. What is the Coopertino effect?

Ben Zimmer: 00:13:46 The Coopertino effect is the name given to the phenomenon of when you rely on a spellchecker too much. It will give you a suggestion, and very often it's a suggestion that you really shouldn't take.