One of the thing that bothers me about such explanations is the inherent bias "post hoc, ego propter hoc" (afterwards, therefore caused by).
People who like such explanations tend to ignore myriads of counterexamples set by people who survived worse, while not becoming serial murderers. I can't even begin imagining what was it like to be in Nazi concentration camps, almost surely worse than whatever young Ted Kaczynski went through. And yet there wasn't a wave of brutal crime unleashed by the survivors once they got out. Instead, there was a lot of art, literature etc.
It is possible that Kaczynski's mind was uniquely predisposed towards terrorism and the experiments he underwent at 17 were the final nudge that slowly pushed him to start distributing bombs 20 years later. Yet he himself maintained that they didn't. AFAIK it was mostly his lawyers who tried to arguing so during his trial - not he himself.
Edit: this is obviously a controversial comment, as I saw it falling from +5 to +1 in a matter of minutes. I would recommend reading up some works by Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist who survived four concentration camps. He studied the crushing effects of the camps on human minds in detail; after reading his work, I am almost certain that a two-hour-weekly experiment done on a Harvard campus cannot compare.
The survivors of Holocaust had actually huge amount of serious mental health issues impacting every one around and in general, groups of traumatized people of all kinds in fact have higher violence rates.
I mean, I agree with your larger point about Kaczynski specifically. We do not use a single traumatic experience as excuse/explanation for mass murder after - unless we like the perpetrator for some reason.
Just that, violence has ugly consequences on its survivors and that included Holocaust. It is just that those are not all that often shown in popular media.
I don't see how events like the Holocaust and a mind control experiment are related. The first one is a universally acknowledged shared experience, i.e. no substitution of reality takes place.
The latter is literally designed to make the victims doubt their own sanity.
Being kept as a prisoner in a mass murder factory for years, IMHO, is a much stronger negative influence than undergoing whatever psychological experiment for two hours a week.
While I agree that the experiments run by Murray were nasty, the students were volunteers and spent vast majority of their personal time on their own activities, not in any kind of closed brainwashing facility where you just can't escape.
Throwing together in a broad set, labelled "«negative influence»", conditions that in a form probably did and in other forms you are claiming should have triggered a specific class of effects, and having taken such untenable assumption further reasoning quantitatively to prove points, makes your comment controversial.
We cannot just suppose that the (resulting) class of behaviours in question would be necessary consequence of "intense general «negative influence»" - proposal which you yourself deny through observation, but that was not theorized in the first place.
Maybe you're talking about PTSD, soldiers or prisoners or anyone in a war often have, but this is just one range of mental disorders among many others. Even stress, anxiety, drug dependence/addiction are also mental illnesses, food or other overconsumption. In the end the normality is not sanity nowadays in rich countries
People who like such explanations tend to ignore myriads of counterexamples set by people who survived worse, while not becoming serial murderers. I can't even begin imagining what was it like to be in Nazi concentration camps, almost surely worse than whatever young Ted Kaczynski went through. And yet there wasn't a wave of brutal crime unleashed by the survivors once they got out. Instead, there was a lot of art, literature etc.
It is possible that Kaczynski's mind was uniquely predisposed towards terrorism and the experiments he underwent at 17 were the final nudge that slowly pushed him to start distributing bombs 20 years later. Yet he himself maintained that they didn't. AFAIK it was mostly his lawyers who tried to arguing so during his trial - not he himself.
Edit: this is obviously a controversial comment, as I saw it falling from +5 to +1 in a matter of minutes. I would recommend reading up some works by Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist who survived four concentration camps. He studied the crushing effects of the camps on human minds in detail; after reading his work, I am almost certain that a two-hour-weekly experiment done on a Harvard campus cannot compare.