wire and cloth mother experiment

Harry Harlow Theory & Rhesus Monkey Experiments in Psychology

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Harlow (1958 wanted to study the mechanisms by which newborn rhesus monkeys bond with their mothers.

These infants depended highly on their mothers for nutrition, protection, comfort, and socialization. What, exactly, though, was the basis of the bond?

The learning theory of attachment suggests that an infant would form an attachment with a carer who provides food. In contrast, Harlow explained that attachment develops due to the mother providing “tactile comfort,” suggesting that infants have an innate (biological) need to touch and cling to something for emotional comfort.

Harry Harlow did a number of studies on attachment in rhesus monkeys during the 1950’s and 1960″s. His experiments took several forms:

Cloth Mother vs. Wire Mother Experiment

Experiment 1.

Harlow (1958) separated infant monkeys from their mothers immediately after birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one covered in soft terry toweling cloth.

In the first group, the terrycloth mother provided no food, while the wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk.

Both groups of monkeys spent more time with the cloth mother (even if she had no milk). The infant would only go to the wire mother when hungry. Once fed it would return to the cloth mother for most of the day. If a frightening object was placed in the cage the infant took refuge with the cloth mother (its safe base).

This surrogate was more effective in decreasing the youngster’s fear. The infant would explore more when the cloth mother was present.

This supports the evolutionary theory of attachment , in that the sensitive response and security of the caregiver are important (as opposed to the provision of food).

Experiment 2

Harlow (1958) modified his experiment and separated the infants into two groups: the terrycloth mother which provided no food, or the wire mother which did.

All the monkeys drank equal amounts and grew physically at the same rate. But the similarities ended there. Monkeys who had soft, tactile contact with their terry cloth mothers behaved quite differently than monkeys whose mothers were made out of hard wire.

The behavioral differences that Harlow observed between the monkeys who had grown up with surrogate mothers and those with normal mothers were;

They were much more timid.
They didn’t know how to act with other monkeys.
They were easily bullied and wouldn’t stand up for themselves.
They had difficulty with mating.
The females were inadequate mothers.

These behaviors were observed only in the monkeys left with the surrogate mothers for more than 90 days.

For those left less than 90 days, the effects could be reversed if placed in a normal environment where they could form attachments.

Rhesus Monkeys Reared in Isolation

Harlow (1965) took babies and isolated them from birth. They had no contact with each other or anybody else.

He kept some this way for three months, some for six, some for nine and some for the first year of their lives. He then put them back with other monkeys to see what effect their failure to form attachment had on behavior.

The results showed the monkeys engaged in bizarre behavior, such as clutching their own bodies and rocking compulsively. They were then placed back in the company of other monkeys.

To start with the babies were scared of the other monkeys, and then became very aggressive towards them. They were also unable to communicate or socialize with other monkeys. The other monkeys bullied them. They indulged in self-mutilation, tearing hair out, scratching, and biting their own arms and legs.<!–

In addition, Harlow created a state of anxiety in female monkeys which had implications once they became parents. Such monkeys became so neurotic that they smashed their infant’s face into the floor and rubbed it back and forth.

Harlow concluded that privation (i.e., never forming an attachment bond) is permanently damaging (to monkeys).

The extent of the abnormal behavior reflected the length of the isolation. Those kept in isolation for three months were the least affected, but those in isolation for a year never recovered from the effects of privation.

Conclusions

Studies of monkeys raised with artificial mothers suggest that mother-infant emotional bonds result primarily from mothers providing infants with comfort and tactile contact, rather than just fulfilling basic needs like food.

Harlow concluded that for a monkey to develop normally s/he must have some interaction with an object to which they can cling during the first months of life (critical period).

Clinging is a natural response – in times of stress the monkey runs to the object to which it normally clings as if the clinging decreases the stress.

He also concluded that early maternal deprivation leads to emotional damage but that its impact could be reversed in monkeys if an attachment was made before the end of the critical period .

However, if maternal deprivation lasted after the end of the critical period, then no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the emotional damage that had already occurred.

Harlow found, therefore, that it was social deprivation rather than maternal deprivation that the young monkeys were suffering from.

When he brought some other infant monkeys up on their own, but with 20 minutes a day in a playroom with three other monkeys, he found they grew up to be quite normal emotionally and socially.

The Impact of Harlow’s Research

Harlow’s research has helped social workers to understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse such as a lack of comfort (and so intervene to prevent it).

Using animals to study attachment can benefit children who are most at risk in society and can also have later economic implications, as those children are more likely to grow up to be productive members of society.

Ethics of Harlow’s Study

Harlow’s work has been criticized. His experiments have been seen as unnecessarily cruel (unethical) and of limited value in attempting to understand the effects of deprivation on human infants.

It was clear that the monkeys in this study suffered from emotional harm from being reared in isolation. This was evident when the monkeys were placed with a normal monkey (reared by a mother), they sat huddled in a corner in a state of persistent fear and depression.

Harlow’s experiment is sometimes justified as providing a valuable insight into the development of attachment and social behavior. At the time of the research, there was a dominant belief that attachment was related to physical (i.e., food) rather than emotional care.

It could be argued that the benefits of the research outweigh the costs (the suffering of the animals). For example, the research influenced the theoretical work of John Bowlby , the most important psychologist in attachment theory.

It could also be seen as vital in convincing people about the importance of emotional care in hospitals, children’s homes, and daycare.

Harlow, H. F., Dodsworth, R. O., & Harlow, M. K. (1965). Total social isolation in monkeys . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 54 (1), 90.

Harlow, H. F. & Zimmermann, R. R. (1958). The development of affective responsiveness in infant monkeys . Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 102 ,501 -509.

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Harry Harlow and the Nature of Affection

What Harlow's Infamous Monkey Mother Experiments Revealed

Love and Affection
Harry Harlow's Research on Love
Wire Mother Experiment
Fear and Security

Impact of Harry Harlow’s Research

Frequently asked questions.

Harry Harlow was one of the first psychologists to scientifically investigate the nature of human love and affection. Through a series of controversial monkey mother experiments, Harlow was able to demonstrate the importance of early attachments, affection, and emotional bonds in the course of healthy development.

This article discusses his famous monkey mother experiments and what the results revealed. It also explores why Harlow's monkey experiments are so unethical and controversial.

Early Research On Love

During the first half of the 20th century, many psychologists believed that showing affection towards children was merely a sentimental gesture that served no real purpose. According to many thinkers of the day, affection would only spread diseases and lead to adult psychological problems.

"When you are tempted to pet your child, remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument," the behaviorist John B. Watson once even went so far as to warn parents.

Psychologists were motivated to prove their field as a rigorous science. The behaviorist movement dominated the field of psychology during this time. This approach urged researchers to study only observable and measurable behaviors.

An American psychologist named Harry Harlow , however, became interested in studying a topic that was not so easy to quantify and measure—love. In a series of controversial experiments conducted during the 1960s, Harlow demonstrated the powerful effects of love and in particular, the absence of love.

His work demonstrated the devastating effects of deprivation on young rhesus monkeys. Harlow's research revealed the importance of a caregiver's love for healthy childhood development.

Harlow's experiments were often unethical and shockingly cruel , yet they uncovered fundamental truths that have influenced our understanding of child development.

Harry Harlow's Research on Love

Harlow noted that very little attention had been devoted to the experimental research of love. At the time, most observations were largely philosophical and anecdotal.

"Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition, and discerning guesswork, whether these have been proposed by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, or psychoanalysts ," he noted.

Many of the existing theories of love centered on the idea that the earliest attachment between a mother and child was merely a means for the child to obtain food, relieve thirst, and avoid pain. Harlow, however, believed that this behavioral view of mother-child attachments was an inadequate explanation.

The Monkey Mother Experiment

His most famous experiment involved giving young rhesus monkeys a choice between two different "mothers." One was made of soft terrycloth but provided no food. The other was made of wire but provided nourishment from an attached baby bottle.

Harlow removed young monkeys from their natural mothers a few hours after birth and left them to be "raised" by these mother surrogates. The experiment demonstrated that the baby monkeys spent significantly more time with their cloth mother than with their wire mother.

In other words, the infant monkeys went to the wire mother only for food but preferred to spend their time with the soft, comforting cloth mother when they were not eating.

Based on these findings, Harry Harlow concluded that affection was the primary force behind the need for closeness.

Harry Harlow's Further Research

Later research demonstrated that young monkeys would also turn to their cloth surrogate mother for comfort and security. Such work revealed that affectionate bonds were critical for development.

Harlow utilized a "strange situation" technique similar to the one created by attachment researcher Mary Ainsworth . Young monkeys were allowed to explore a room either in the presence of their surrogate mother or in her absence.

Monkeys who were with their cloth mother would use her as a secure base to explore the room. When the surrogate mothers were removed from the room, the effects were dramatic. The young monkeys no longer had their secure base for exploration and would often freeze up, crouch, rock, scream, and cry.

Harry Harlow’s experiments offered irrefutable proof that love is vital for normal childhood development . Additional experiments by Harlow revealed the long-term devastation caused by deprivation, leading to profound psychological and emotional distress and even death.

Harlow’s work, as well as important research by psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, helped influence key changes in how orphanages, adoption agencies, social services groups, and childcare providers approached the care of children.

Harlow's work led to acclaim and generated a wealth of research on love, affection, and interpersonal relationships. However, his own personal life was marked by conflict.

After the terminal illness of his wife, he became engulfed by alcohol misuse and depression, eventually becoming estranged from his own children. Colleagues frequently described him as sarcastic, mean-spirited, misanthropic, chauvinistic, and cruel.

While he was treated for depression and eventually returned to work, his interests shifted following the death of his wife. He no longer focused on maternal attachment and instead developed an interest in depression and isolation.

Despite the turmoil that marked his later personal life, Harlow's enduring legacy reinforced the importance of emotional support, affection, and love in the development of children.

A Word From Verywell

Harry Harlow's work was controversial in his own time and continues to draw criticism today. While such experiments present major ethical dilemmas, his work helped inspire a shift in the way that we think about children and development and helped researchers better understand both the nature and importance of love.

Harlow's research demonstrated the importance of love and affection, specifically contact comfort, for healthy childhood development. His research demonstrated that children become attached to caregivers that provide warmth and love, and that this love is not simply based on providing nourishment.

Harlow's monkey mother experiment was unethical because of the treatment of the infant monkeys. The original monkey mother experiments were unnecessarily cruel. The infant monkeys were deprived of maternal care and social contact.

In later experiments, Harlow kept monkeys in total isolation in what he himself dubbed a "pit of despair." While the experiments provided insight into the importance of comfort contact for early childhood development, the research was cruel and unethical.

Hu TY, Li J, Jia H, Xie X. Helping others, warming yourself: altruistic behaviors increase warmth feelings of the ambient environment . Front Psychol . 2016;7:1349. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01349

Suomi SJ. Risk, resilience, and gene-environment interplay in primates . J Can Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry . 2011;20(4):289-297.

Zhang B. Consequences of early adverse rearing experience(EARE) on development: insights from non-human primate studies . Zool Res . 2017;38(1):7-35. doi:10.13918/j.issn.2095-8137.2017.002

Harlow HF. The nature of love . American Psychologist. 1958;13(12):673-685. doi:10.1037/h0047884

Hong YR, Park JS. Impact of attachment, temperament and parenting on human development . Korean J Pediatr . 2012;55(12):449-454. doi:10.3345/kjp.2012.55.12.449

Blum D. Love at Goon Park . New York: Perseus Publishing; 2011.

Ottaviani J, Meconis D. Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love . Ann Arbor, MI: G.T. Labs; 2007.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Classics in the History of Psychology

An internet resource developed by Christopher D. Green York University , Toronto , Ontario ISSN 1492-3173

(Return to Classics index )

The Nature of Love

Harry F. Harlow (1958) [ 1 ] University of Wisconsin

First published in American Psychologist , 13 , 673-685

Posted March 2000

Address of the President at the sixty-sixth Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D. C., August 31, 1958. First published in American Psychologist , 13 , 573-685.

Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender, and rewarding. Because of its intimate and personal nature it is regarded by some as an improper topic for experimental research. But, whatever our personal feelings may be, our assigned mission as psychologists is to analyze all facets of human and animal behavior into their component variables. So far as love or affection is concerned, psychologists have failed in this mission. The little we know about love does not transcend simple observation, and the little we write about it has been written better by poets and novelists. But of greater concern is the fact that psychologists tend to give progressively less attention to a motive which pervades our entire lives. Psychologists, at least psychologists who write textbooks, not only show no interest in the origin and development of love or affection, but they seem to be unaware of its very existence.

The apparent repression of love by modem psychologists stands in sharp contrast with the attitude taken by many famous and normal people. The word "love" has the highest reference frequency of any word cited in Bartlett's book of Familiar Quotations. It would appear that this emotion has long had a vast interest and fascination for human beings, regardless of the attitude taken by psychologists; but the quotations cited, even by famous and normal people, have a mundane redundancy. These authors and authorities have stolen love from the child and infant and made it the exclusive property of the adolescent and adult.

Thoughtful men, and probably all women, have speculated on the nature of love. From the developmental point of view, the general plan is quite clear: The initial love responses of the human being are those made by the infant to the mother or some mother surrogate. From this intimate attachment of the child to the mother, multiple learned and generalized affectional responses are formed.

Unfortunately, beyond these simple facts we know little about the fundamental variables underlying the formation of affectional responses and little about the mechanisms through which the love of the infant for the mother develops into the multifaceted response patterns characterizing love or affection in the adult. Because of the dearth of experimentation, theories about the fundamental nature of affection have evolved at the level of observation, intuition, and discerning guesswork, whether these have been proposed by psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, or psychoanalysts.

The position commonly held by psychologists and sociologists is quite clear: The basic motives are, for the most part, the primary drives -- particularly hunger, thirst, elimination, pain, and sex -- and all other motives, including love or affection, are derived or secondary drives. The mother is associated with the reduction of the primary drives -- particularly hunger, thirst, and pain -- and through learning, affection or love is derived.

It is entirely reasonable to believe that the mother through association with food may become a secondary-reinforcing agent, but this is an inadequate mechanism to account for the persistence of the infant-maternal ties. There is a spate of researches on the formation of secondary reinforcers to hunger and thirst reduction. There can be no question that almost any external stimulus can become a secondary reinforcer if properly associated with tissue-need reduction, but the fact remains that this redundant literature demonstrates unequivocally that such derived drives suffer relatively rapid experimental extinction. Contrariwise, human affection does not extinguish when the mother ceases to have intimate association with the drives in question. Instead, the affectional ties to the mother show a lifelong, unrelenting persistence and, even more surprising, widely expanding generality.

Oddly enough, one of the few psychologists who took a position counter to modern psychological dogma was John B. Watson, who believed that love was an innate emotion elicited by cutaneous stimulation of the erogenous zones. But experimental psychologists, with their peculiar propensity to discover facts that are not true, brushed this theory aside by demonstrating that the human neonate had no differentiable emotions, and they established a fundamental psychological law that prophets are without honor in their own profession.

The psychoanalysts have concerned themselves with the problem of the nature of the development of love in the neonate and infant, using ill and aging human beings as subjects. They have discovered the overwhelming importance of the breast and related this to the oral erotic tendencies developed at an age preceding their subjects' memories. Their theories range from a belief that the infant has an innate need to achieve and suckle at the breast to beliefs not unlike commonly accepted psychological theories. There are exceptions, as seen in the recent writings of John Bowlby, who attributes importance not only to food and thirst satisfaction, but also to "primary object-clinging," a need for intimate physical contact, which is initially associated with the mother.

As far as I know, there exists no direct experimental analysis of the relative importance of the stimulus variables determining the affectional or love responses in the neonatal and infant primate. Unfortunately, the human neonate is a limited experimental subject for such researches because of his inadequate motor capabilities. By the time the human infant's motor responses can be precisely measured, the antecedent determining conditions cannot be defined, having been lost in a jumble and jungle of confounded variables.

Many of these difficulties can be resolved by the use of the neonatal and infant macaque monkey as the subject for the analysis of basic affectional variables. It is possible to make precise measurements in this primate beginning at two to ten days of age, depending upon the maturational status of the individual animal at birth. The macaque infant differs from the human infant in that the monkey is more mature at birth and grows more rapidly; but the basic responses relating to affection, including nursing, contact, clinging, and even visual and auditory exploration, exhibit no fundamental differences in the two species. Even the development of perception, fear, frustration, and learning capability follows very similar sequences in rhesus monkeys and human children.

Three years' experimentation before we started our studies on affection gave us experience with the neonatal monkey. We had separated more than 60 of these animals from their mothers 6 to 12 hours after birth and suckled them on tiny bottles. The infant mortality was only a small fraction of what would have obtained had we let the monkey mothers raise their infants. Our bottle-fed babies were healthier and heavier than monkey-mother-reared infants. We know that we are better monkey mothers than are real monkey mothers thanks to synthetic diets, vitamins, iron extracts, penicillin, chloromycetin, 5% glucose, and constant, tender, loving care.

During the course of these studies we noticed that the laboratory raised babies showed strong attachment to the cloth pads (folded gauze diapers) which were used to cover the hardware-cloth floors of their cages. The infants clung to these pads and engaged in violet temper tantrums when the pads were removed and replaced for sanitary reasons. Such contact-need or responsiveness had been reported previously by Gertrude van Wagenen for the monkey and by Thomas McCulloch and George Haslerud for the chimpanzee and is reminiscent of the devotion often exhibited by human infants to their pillows, blankets, and soft, cuddly stuffed toys. Responsiveness by the one-day-old infant monkey to the cloth pad is shown in Figure 1, and an unusual and strong attachment of a six-month-old infant to the cloth pad is illustrated in Figure 2. The baby, human or monkey, if it is to survive, must clutch at more than a straw.

At this point we decided to study the development of affectional responses of neonatal and infant monkeys to an artificial, inanimate mother, and so we built a surrogate mother which we hoped and believed would be a good surrogate mother. In devising this surrogate mother we were dependent neither upon the capriciousness of evolutionary processes nor upon mutations produced by chance radioactive fallout. Instead, we designed the mother surrogate in terms of modem human engineering principles (Figure 3). We produced a perfectly proportioned, streamlined body stripped of unnecessary bulges and appendices. Redundancy in the surrogate mother's system was avoided by reducing the number of breasts from two to one and placing this unibreast in an upper-thoracic, sagittal position, thus maximizing the natural and known perceptual-motor capabilities of the infant operator. The surrogate was made from a block of wood, covered with sponge rubber, and sheathed in tan cotton terry cloth. A light bulb behind her radiated heat. The result was a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or bit her baby in anger. Furthermore, we designed a mother-machine with maximal maintenance efficiency since failure of any system or function could be resolved by the simple substitution of black boxes and new component parts. It is our opinion that we engineered a very superior monkey mother, although this position is not held universally by the monkey fathers.

One control group of neonatal monkeys was raised on a single wire mother, and a second control group was raised on a single cloth mother. There were no differences between these two groups in amount of milk ingested or in weight gain. The only difference between the two groups lay in the composition of the feces, the softer stools of the wire-mother infants suggesting psychosomatic involvement. The wire mother is biologically adequate but psychologically inept.

We were not surprised to discover that contact comfort was an important basic affectional or love variable, but we did not expect it to overshadow so completely the variable of nursing; indeed; indeed, the disparity is so great as to suggest that the primary function of nursing as an affectional variable is that of insuring frequent and intimate body contact of the infant with the mother. Certainly, man cannot live by milk alone. Love is an emotion that does not need to be bottle- or spoon-fed, and we may be sure that there is nothing to be gained by giving lip service to love.

A charming lady once heard me describe these experiments and, when I subsequently talked to her, her face brightened with sudden insight: "Now I know what's wrong with me," she said, "I'm just a wire mother." Perhaps she was lucky. She might have been a wire wife.

We believe that contact comfort has long served the animal kingdom as a motivating agent for affectional responses. Since at the present time we have no experimental data to substantiate this position, we supply information which must be accepted, if at all, on the basis of face validity:

One function of the real mother, human or subhuman, and presumably of a mother surrogate, is to provide a haven of safety for the infant in times of fear and danger. The frightened or ailing child clings to its mother, not its father; and this selective responsiveness in times of distress, disturbance, or danger may be used as a measure of the strength of affectional bonds. We have tested this kind of differential responsiveness by presenting to the infants in their cages, in the presence of the two mothers, various fear-producing stimuli such as the moving toy bear illustrated in Figure 13. A typical response to a fear stimulus is shown in Figure 14, and the data on differential responsiveness are presented in Figure 15. It is apparent that the cloth mother is highly preferred over the wire one, and this differential selectivity is enhanced by age and experience. In this situation, the variable of nursing appears to be of absolutely no importance: the infant consistently seeks the soft mother surrogate regardless of nursing condition.

Similarly, the mother or mother surrogate provides its young with a source of security, and this role or function is seen with special clarity when mother and child are in a strange situation. At the present time we have completed tests for this relationship on four of our eight baby monkeys assigned to the dual mother-surrogate condition by introducing them for three minutes into the strange environment of a room measuring six feet by six feet by six feet (also called the "open-field test") and containing multiple stimuli known to elicit curiosity-manipulatory responses in baby monkeys. The subjects were placed in this situation twice a week for eight weeks with no mother surrogate present during alternate sessions and the cloth mother present during the others. A cloth diaper was always available as one of the stimuli throughout all sessions. After one or two adaptation sessions, the infants always rushed to the mother surrogate when she was present and clutched her, rubbed their bodies against her, and frequently manipulated her body and face. After a few additional sessions, the infants began to use the mother surrogate as a source of security, a base of operations. As is shown in Figures 16 and 17, they would explore and manipulate a stimulus and then return to the mother before adventuring again into the strange new world. The behavior of these infants was quite different when the mother was absent from the room. Frequently they would freeze in a crouched position, as is illustrated in Figures 18 and 19. Emotionality indices such as vocalization, crouching, rocking, and sucking increased sharply, as shown in Figure 20. Total emotionality score was cut in half when the mother was present. In the absence of the mother some of the experimental monkeys would rush to the center of the room where the mother was customarily placed and then run rapidly from object to object, screaming and crying all the while. Continuous, frantic clutching of their bodies was very common, even when not in the crouching position. These monkeys frequently contacted and clutched the cloth diaper, but this action never pacified them. The same behavior occurred in the presence of the wire mother. No difference between the cloth-mother-fed and wire-mother-fed infants was demonstrated under either condition. Four control infants never raised with a mother surrogate showed the same emotionality scores when the mother was absent as the experimental infants showed in the absence of the mother, but the controls' scores were slightly larger in the presence of the mother surrogate than in her absence.

The first four infant monkeys in the dual mother-surrogate group were separated from their mothers between 165 and 170 days of age and tested for retention during the following 9 days and then at 30-day intervals for six successive months. Affectional retention as measured by the modified Butler box is given in Figure 23. In keeping with the data obtained on adult monkeys by Butler, we find a high rate of responding to any stimulus, even the empty box. But throughout the entire 185-day retention period there is a consistent and significant difference in response frequency to the cloth mother contrasted with either the wire mother or the empty box, and no consistent difference between wire mother and empty box.

Affectional retention was also tested in the open field during the first 9 days after separation and then at 30-day intervals, and each test condition was run twice at each retention interval. The infant's behavior differed from that observed during the period preceding separation. When the cloth mother was present in the post-separation period, the babies rushed to her, climbed up, clung tightly to her, and rubbed their heads and faces against her body. After this initial embrace and reunion, they played on the mother, including biting and tearing at her cloth cover; but they rarely made any attempt to leave her during the test period, nor did they manipulate or play with the objects in the room, in contrast with their behavior before maternal separation. The only exception was the occasional monkey that left the mother surrogate momentarily, grasped the folded piece of paper (one of the standard stimuli in the field), and brought it quickly back to the mother. It appeared that deprivation had enhanced the tie to the mother and rendered the contact-comfort need so prepotent that need for the mother overwhelmed the exploratory motives during the brief, three-minute test sessions. No change in these behaviors was observed throughout the 185-day period. When the mother was absent from the open field, the behavior of the infants was similar in the initial retention test to that during the preseparation tests; but they tended to show gradual adaptation to the open-field situation with repeated testing and, consequently, a reduction in their emotionality scores.

In the last five retention test periods, an additional test was introduced in which the surrogate mother was placed in the center of the room and covered with a clear Plexiglas box. The monkeys were initially disturbed and frustrated when their explorations and manipulations of the box failed to provide contact with the mother. However, all animals adapted to the situation rather rapidly. Soon they used the box as a place of orientation for exploratory and play behavior, made frequent contacts with the objects in the field, and very often brought these objects to the Plexiglas box. The emotionality index was slightly higher than in the condition of the available cloth mothers, but it in no way approached the emotionality level displayed when the cloth mother was absent. Obviously, the infant monkeys gained emotional security by the presence of the mother even though contact was denied.

Affectional retention has also been measured by tests in which the monkey must unfasten a three-device mechanical puzzle to obtain entrance into a compartment containing the mother surrogate. All the trials are initiated by allowing the infant to go through an unlocked door, and in half the trials it finds the mother present and in half, an empty compartment. The door is then locked and a ten-minute test conducted. In tests given prior to separation from the surrogate mothers, some of the infants had solved this puzzle and others had failed. The data of Figure 24 show that on the last test before separation there were no differences in total manipulation under mother-present and mother-absent conditions, but striking differences exist between the two conditions throughout the post-separation test periods. Again, there is no interaction with conditions of feeding.

The over-all picture obtained from surveying the retention data is unequivocal. There is little, if any, waning of responsiveness to the mother throughout this five-month period as indicated by any measure. It becomes perfectly obvious that this affectional bond is highly resistant to forgetting and that it can be retained for very long periods of time by relatively infrequent contact reinforcement. During the next year, retention tests will be conducted at 90-day intervals, and further plans are dependent upon the results obtained. It would appear that affectional responses may show as much resistance to extinction as has been previously demonstrated for learned fears and learned pain, and such data would be in keeping with those of common human observation.

The infant's responses to the mother surrogate in the fear tests, the open-field situation, and the baby Butler box and the responses on the retention tests cannot be described adequately with words. For supplementary information we turn to the motion picture record. (At this point a 20-minute film was presented illustrating and supplementing the behaviors described thus far in the address.)

We have already described the group of four control infants that had never lived in the presence of any mother surrogate and had demonstrated no sign of affection or security in the presence of the cloth mothers introduced in test sessions. When these infants reached the age of 250 days, cubicles containing both a cloth mother and a wire mother were attached to their cages. There was no lactation in these mothers, for the monkeys were on a solid-food diet. The initial reaction of the monkeys to the alterations was one of extreme disturbance. All the infants screamed violently and made repeated attempts to escape the cage whenever the door was opened. They kept a maximum distance from the mother surrogates and exhibited a considerable amount of rocking and crouching behavior, indicative of emotionality. Our first thought was that the critical period for the development of maternally directed affection had passed and that these macaque children were doomed to live as affectional orphans. Fortunately, these behaviors continued for only 12 to 48 hours and then gradually ebbed, changing from indifference to active contact on, and exploration of, the surrogates. The home-cage behavior of these control monkeys slowly became similar to that of the animals raised with the mother surrogates from birth. Their manipulation and play on the cloth mother became progressively more vigorous to the point of actual mutilation, particularly during the morning after the cloth mother had been given her daily change of terry covering. The control subjects were now actively running to the cloth mother when frightened and had to be coaxed from her to be taken from the cage for formal testing.

Objective evidence of these changing behaviors is given in Figure 25, which plots the amount of time these infants spent on the mother surrogates. Within 10 days mean contact time is approximately nine hours, and this measure remains relatively constant throughout the next 30 days. Consistent with the results on the subjects reared from birth with dual mothers, these late-adopted infants spent less than one and one-half hours per day in contact with the wire mothers, and this activity level was relatively constant throughout the test sessions. Although the maximum time that the control monkeys spent on the cloth mother was only about half that Spent by the original dual mother-surrogate group, we cannot be sure that this discrepancy is a function of differential early experience. The control monkeys were about three months older when the mothers were attached to their cages than the experimental animals had been when their mothers were removed and the retention tests begun. Thus, we do not know what the amount of contact would be for a 250-day-old animal raised from birth with surrogate mothers. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the differences and the fact that the contact-time curves for the mothered-from-birth infants had remained constant for almost 150 days suggest that early experience with the mother is a variable of measurable importance.

The control group has also been tested for differential visual exploration after the introduction of the cloth and wire mothers; these behaviors are plotted in Figure 26. By the second test session a high level of exploratory behavior had developed, and the responsiveness to the wire mother and the empty box is significantly greater than that to the cloth mother. This is probably not an artifact since there is every reason to believe that the face of the cloth mother is a fear stimulus to most monkeys that have not had extensive experience with this object during the first 40 to 60 days of life. Within the third test session a sharp change in trend occurs, and the cloth mother is then more frequently viewed than the wire mother or the blank box; this trend continues during the fourth session, producing a significant preference for the cloth mother.

Before the introduction of the mother surrogate into the home-cage situation, only one of the four control monkeys had ever contacted the cloth mother in the open-field tests. In general, the surrogate mother not only gave the infants no security, but instead appeared to serve as a fear stimulus. The emotionality scores of these control subjects were slightly higher during the mother-present test sessions than during the mother-absent test sessions. These behaviors were changed radically by the fourth post-introduction test approximately 60 days later. In the absence of the cloth mothers the emotionality index in this fourth test remains near the earlier level, but the score is reduced by half when the mother is present, a result strikingly similar to that found for infants raised with the dual mother-surrogates from birth. The control infants now show increasing object exploration and play behavior, and they begin to use the mother as a base of operations, as did the infants raised from birth with the mother surrogates. However, there are still definite differences in the behavior of the two groups. The control infants do not rush directly to the mother and clutch her violently; but instead they go toward, and orient around, her, usually after an initial period during which they frequently show disturbed behavior, exploratory behavior, or both.

That the control monkeys develop affection or love for the cloth mother when she is introduced into the cage at 250 days of age cannot be questioned. There is every reason to believe, however, that this interval of delay depresses the intensity of the affectional response below that of the infant monkeys that were surrogate-mothered from birth onward. In interpreting these data it is well to remember that the control monkeys had had continuous opportunity to observe and hear other monkeys housed in adjacent cages and that they had had limited opportunity to view and contact surrogate mothers in the test situations, even though they did not exploit the opportunities.

During the last two years we have observed the behavior of two infants raised by their own mothers. Love for the real mother and love for the surrogate mother appear to be very similar. The baby macaque spends many hours a day clinging to its real mother. If away from the mother when frightened, it rushes to her and in her presence shows comfort and composure. As far as we can observe, the infant monkey's affection for the real mother is strong, but no stronger than that of the experimental monkey for the surrogate cloth mother, and the security that the infant gains from the presence of the real mother is no greater than the security it gains from a cloth surrogate. Next year we hope to put this problem to final, definitive, experimental test. But, whether the mother is real or a cloth surrogate, there does develop a deep and abiding bond between mother and child. In one case it may be the call of the wild and in the other the McCall of civilization, but in both cases there is "togetherness."

In spite of the importance of contact comfort, there is reason to believe that other variables of measurable importance will be discovered. Postural support may be such a variable, and it has been suggested that, when we build arms into the mother surrogate, 10 is the minimal number required to provide adequate child care. Rocking motion may be such a variable, and we are comparing rocking and stationary mother surrogates and inclined planes. The differential responsiveness to cloth mother and cloth-covered inclined plane suggests that clinging as well as contact is an affectional variable of importance. Sounds, particularly natural, maternal sounds, may operate as either unlearned or learned affectional variables. Visual responsiveness may be such a variable, and it is possible that some semblance of visual imprinting may develop in the neonatal monkey. There are indications that this becomes a variable of importance during the course of infancy through some maturational process.

John Bowlby has suggested that there is an affectional variable which he calls "primary object following," characterized by visual and oral search of the mother's face. Our surrogate-mother-raised baby monkeys are at first inattentive to her face, as are human neonates to human mother faces. But by 30 days of age ever-increasing responsiveness to the mother's face appears -- whether through learning, maturation, or both -- and we have reason to believe that the face becomes an object of special attention.

Our first surrogate-mother-raised baby had a mother whose head was just a ball of wood since the baby was a month early and we had not had time to design a more esthetic head and face. This baby had contact with the blank-faced mother for 180 days and was then placed with two cloth mothers, one motionless and one rocking, both being endowed with painted, ornamented faces. To our surprise the animal would compulsively rotate both faces 180 degrees so that it viewed only a round, smooth face and never the painted, ornamented face. Furthermore, it would do this as long as the patience of the experimenter in reorienting the faces persisted. The monkey showed no sign of fear or anxiety, but it showed unlimited persistence. Subsequently it improved its technique, compulsively removing the heads and rolling them into its cage as fast as they were returned. We are intrigued by this observation, and we plan to examine systematically the role of the mother face in the development of infant-monkey affections. Indeed, these observations suggest the need for a series of ethological-type researches on the two-faced female.

Although we have made no attempts thus far to study the generalization of infant-macaque affection or love, the techniques which we have developed offer promise in this uncharted field. Beyond this, there are few if any technical difficulties in studying the affection of the actual, living mother for the child, and the techniques developed can be utilized and expanded for the analysis and developmental study of father-infant and infant-infant affection.

Since we can measure neonatal and infant affectional responses to mother surrogates, and since we know they are strong and persisting, we are in a position to assess the effects of feeding and contactual schedules; consistency and inconsistency in the mother surrogates; and early, intermediate, and late maternal deprivation. Again, we have here a family of problems of fundamental interest and theoretical importance.

If the researches completed and proposed make a contribution, I shall be grateful; but I have also given full thought to possible practical applications. The socioeconomic demands of the present and the threatened socioeconomic demands of the future have led the American woman to displace, or threaten to displace, the American man in science and industry. If this process continues, the problem of proper child-rearing practices faces us with startling clarity. It is cheering in view of this trend to realize that the American male is physically endowed with all the really essential equipment to compete with the American female on equal terms in one essential activity: the rearing of infants. We now know that women in the working classes are not needed in the home because of their primary mammalian capabilities; and it is possible that in the foreseeable future neonatal nursing will not be regarded as a necessity, but as a luxury ---to use Veblen's term -- a form of conspicuous consumption limited perhaps to the upper classes. But whatever course history may take, it is comforting to know that we are now in contact with the nature of love.

[1] The researches reported in this paper were supported by funds supplied by Grant No. M-722, National Institutes of Health, by a grant from the Ford Foundation, and by funds received from the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin.

Harlow’s Monkey Experiment (Definition + Contribution to Psychology)

Not all experiments in psychology involve humans; nevertheless, those utilizing animals often aim to shed light on human behavior. Harlow's Monkey experiments had a significant impact on psychology, and despite being considered controversial, they remain influential to this day.

What Are Harlow’s Monkey Experiments?

Harlow's Monkey experiments looked at the influence of parental guidance and interaction during early development. Infant monkeys were placed in isolation, away from their mothers. In other experiments, he took infant monkeys away from their mothers but placed them in a cage with “surrogate” mothers.

In both sets of experiments, he found that the monkeys displayed a specific set of behaviors as a response to their unusual upbringing.

Psychology Before Harlow's Monkey Experiments

Harry Harlow, the man behind the monkey experiments, was a psychologist in the first half of the 20th century. At the time, some conflicting ideas were going around about parenting styles.

Early behaviorists didn’t think parents should be so cuddly. Watson told parents that lots of physical affection would slow down their development.

For years, psychology students were taught that B.F. Skinner’s daughter was subject to the behaviorist’s experiments, and she went crazy after being isolated in a glass box for the first year of her life. Skinner said that she was raised just fine in isolation. (Skinner’s daughter refutes some rumors in a Guardian article .)

As time went on, psychoanalysts like Freud theorized that a child’s development was stunted if the mother didn’t provide love and attention in the first year of the child’s life. If a child experienced trauma during this year, they would develop an oral fixation. After all, getting fed was the most important experience in the first year of a child’s life.

There were a lot of different ideas on how to raise a child. And it makes sense that most parents wanted to do the “right” thing.

So psychologists started to build experiments to test some of these theories. Harry Harlow was one of them. But rather than studying children, he studied rhesus monkeys. His experiments were very different from a lot of psychologists at the time. He wanted to focus on the impact of love and basic physiological needs.

What Happened During Harlow's Monkey Experiments?

The monkeys in isolation were separated from other monkeys for 3-12 months. During that time, some would display behaviors to possibly “self-soothe.” Others would self-mutilate. They would circle anxiously and appear to be distressed.

Harlow also studied what happened when these monkeys were placed back in the company of other monkeys. The results were slightly disturbing. They continued to self-mutilate. They couldn’t integrate themselves into society. These isolated monkeys were scared, aggressive, or dumbfounded. Some of the monkeys died after they stopped eating.

Harlow noted that the longer the monkeys stayed in isolation, the harder it was for them to integrate into society.

Monkeys With Wire or Cloth Mothers

So the monkeys were negatively affected by isolation. But Harlow wanted to go further. Why were the monkeys impacted so significantly? Was it solely because of physiological factors, or did love and affection play a role?

To answer these questions, Harlow set up another experiment. He took the infant monkeys away from their mothers and placed them in a cage with two “surrogate” mothers. One of these surrogate mothers was made out of wire. The other was made out of cloth.

In some cages, the wire mother had food for the monkeys. The cloth mother did not. In other cases, the cloth mother had food for the monkeys. The wire mother did not.

Harlow observed that no matter which surrogate mother held the food, the infants would spend more time with the comforting cloth mother. If only the wire mother had food, the monkeys would only go to them when hungry. Otherwise, they would stay in the comfort of the cloth mother.

This doesn’t mean that the monkeys were fully developed socially. When these monkeys were placed back into cages with other monkeys, they didn’t integrate well. They were shy, didn’t stand up for themselves if bullied, and had trouble mating. The monkeys that did become mothers also had trouble raising their monkeys. Harlow believed these behaviors resulted from the events in their infancy.

Attachment Theory and Harlow's Monkey Experiments

Suppose you have ever read anything from relationship experts or counselors. In that case, you might hear this idea: our relationship with our parents influences the partners we pick and the way we go about relationships. Many psychologists have shared variations of this idea. Some of these variations are cringe-worthy, and some are quite helpful.

One variation of this idea is Attachment Theory . This theory describes four different types of attachments that we develop based on our relationship with our parents. We bring this attachment style (secure, anxious, etc.) into adult relationships.

Attachment Theory was the product of studies conducted by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth. However, their studies are not the only ones influencing how we view attachment formation. One set of experiments, Harlow’s Monkey experiments, played a role in influencing how we view attachment. Due to the unethical nature of this experiment, it’s not always discussed in a psychology class or discussions about relationships.

Controversy and Other Studies on Attachment

If you think, “Those poor monkeys!” you’re not alone. Many people believed that Harlow’s experiments were unethical. Why would you subject live animals to an experiment that would ultimately traumatize them? Remember, some of these monkeys died early due to starvation caused by anxious behaviors. Did those monkeys need to die for the good of science?

While some say yes, others say no. Not all studies on attachment took such harsh measures. For example, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth observed parents and children as parents left the room for a few minutes at a time. You can learn more about these studies, and the Attachment Styles developed as a result of these studies in another video.

Despite the controversy surrounding his experiments, Harlow did positively impact the world of psychology and parenting. The risks he took for studying love and care, when those topics weren’t discussed in psychology, paid off. His work showed the importance of love and affection. Caregivers, parents, and guardians took note. If your parents or grandparents showed you love and affection as a child, you can thank the research of Harry Harlow and other psychologists who studied Attachment and development.

Dreams Of Monkeys Meaning (12 Reasons + Interpretation)
Attachment Styles Theory (Free Test)
John Bowlby Biography - Contributions To Psychology
Mary Ainsworth (Biography)
Golden Child Syndrome (Definition + Examples)

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The Science of Affection: How a Rebel Researcher Pioneered the Study of Love in the 1950s and Illuminated How Parents Shape Children’s Emotional Patterns

By maria popova.

“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,” psychologists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon observed in their indispensable A General Theory of Love . “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn wrote . But although love has been a fixture of philosophy, ethics, and the world’s great spiritual traditions since the dawn of recorded thought, it has earned its place as a subject of science only recently, and chiefly thanks to one man — primate researcher Harry Harlow (October 31, 1905–December 6, 1981), who defied the scientific dogma of his day to unravel the psychological armature of affection, how our formative attachments shape who we become, and why love is the most primary need to be met for healthy development.

In the immeasurably captivating Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection ( public library ), Pulitzer-winning writer Deborah Blum chronicles the trailblazing work and far-reaching legacy of this “chainsmoking, poetry-writing, alcoholic, impossible genius of a psychologist” — a “stubborn, scruffy, middle-aged researcher … who happens to believe that his profession is wrong and doesn’t mind saying so,” a man who “lives at the lab, dawn to dark, fueled by coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, and obsession.”

Harlow’s point of obsession and insurgency was the conviction, boldly defiant of the era’s scientific dogma, that love matters — that it is a centerpiece of our psychoemotional constitution and, as such, merits being systematically studied rather than dismissed as an irrelevant and unscientific whim. Indeed, the book is as much a biography of Harlow himself as it is of this astonishingly nascent idea, which was scientific anathema in Harlow’s heyday but has steered the course of social science and permeated popular culture in the half-century since.

Harry Harlow observes a baby monkey interact with the cloth mother

Harlow used the 120 rhesus monkeys in his lab to study mother-infant attachment and how the effects of maternal separation and social isolation illuminate the nature of love. His most famous experiment devised two versions of an artificial surrogate mother for the baby monkeys — one made entirely of wire and the other, designed to be cozy and cuddly, of wire and cloth; both were internally heated to simulate the warmth of a real mother’s body. The empirical hook was that the wire-only mother held a bottle of milk, which the babies could feed on, whereas the cuddly mother offered nothing but the creaturely comfort of warmth and soft touch.

Upending decades, if not centuries, of prior theories predicated on a kind of survivalist evolutionary pragmatism, Harlow found that the baby monkeys consistently chose the cuddly mother over the feeding but cold mother. They lived latched onto the cloth mother and leaned over to the wire one nearby to take a sip of milk only when they grew hungry, but even as they did this, they remained completely attached — both literally and figuratively — to the cuddly robot. Over and over, the monkeys demonstrated that the safe embrace of comfort is more vital to their development than the steady but cold supply of sustenance.

Harlow’s findings were as profound as they are disquieting, particularly to those of us who are the product of far from perfect parenting. Recounting his central assertion — which he made on national television, further defying the norms of his profession — Blum writes:

We begin our lives with love [and] we learn human connection at home. It is the foundation upon which we build our lives — or it should be — and if the monkey or the human doesn’t learn love in infancy, he or she “may never learn to love at all.”

“If monkeys have taught us anything,” Harlow asserted in reflecting on his experiments, “it’s that you’ve got to learn how to love before you learn how to live.” Today, his findings are revered by developmental psychologists, his methods reviled by animal rights advocates in light of our radically different norms of primate research, and his legacy as enormous and messy as the subject of his study.

To appreciate just how radical a departure from the status quo of science Harlow’s theories were, we must turn to language — for, as the poet Elizabeth Alexander memorably observed, “we live in the word.” Harlow’s work was his life, and he refused to live in limiting language defined by dogma. Blum captures his irreverent genius:

Professor Harlow has already been asked to correct his language: He’s been instructed on the correct term for a close relationship. Why can’t he just say “proximity” like everyone else? Somehow the word “love” just keeps springing to his lips when he talks about parents and children, friends and partners. He’s been known to lose his temper when discussing it. “Perhaps all you’ve known in life is proximity,” he once snapped at a visitor to his lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “I thank God I’ve known more.” […] Who wouldn’t believe that love was, at its best, a safe harbor — a parent’s arm scooping up a frightened child, holding it heart to heart? It’s hard to believe, in retrospect, how many powerful scientists opposed this idea.

Blum points to one researcher emblematic of the era — psychologist John B. Watson, president of the American Psychological Association, who believed that emotion was a moral weakness to be controlled and considered love, the most intense and messiest of the emotions, a supreme offender the corrupting effects of which should be restrained as early as possible. In a particularly spirited passage, he admonished:

When you are tempted to pet your child remember that mother love is a dangerous instrument… Once a child’s character has been spoiled by bad handling, which can be done in a few days, who can say that the damage is ever repaired?

In the midst of this professional climate, Harlow chose “to stand on behalf of that improbable, unreliable, elusive emotion called love” and helmed a quiet, monumental revolution. It’s astonishing to consider that getting science to heed a truth this elemental and intuitive — that love is central to our experience of being human — should necessitate nothing short of a revolution, and yet it very much did. Like any revolution, it required the collusion of kindred spirits working together against an enormous tide of pushback.

Among those confederates was the English psychologist John Bowlby, who pioneered attachment theory and the idea that the fulfillment of physical needs like sustenance and shelter is a secondary drive in the parent-child relationship — love is the primary one. Blum explains:

What attachment theory essentially says is that being loved matters — and, more than that, it matters who loves us and whom we love in return. It’s not just a matter of the warm body holding the bottle; it’s not object love at all; we love specific people and we need them to love us back. And in the case of the child’s tie to the mother, it matters that the mother loves that baby and that the baby knows it. When you are a very small child, love needs to be as tangible as warm arms around you and as audible as the lull of a gentle voice at night.

Bowlby’s work was instrumental, but there was one other essential building block in the architecture of Harlow’s quiet revolution — the work of a New York physician named William Goldfarb, who made the unnerving discovery that parental affection exerts a strong influence on the child’s IQ. Preoccupied with the fate of children in New York’s Jewish orphanages and foundling homes, Goldfarb had grown concerned that social isolation was damaging their intellectual development. To test his theory, he measured their performance on IQ tests and compared it to that of children in foster homes.

Foundling children were often the result of unwanted pregnancies by educated women of high social class, whereas foster kids came from less credentialed backgrounds and ended up with their new parents after the displacement or death of their biological parents. Since existing theories held that genes were the greatest predictor of intelligence, it was expected that the foundlings would perform better than the foster kids on IQ tests. But Goldfarb found the opposite. Love and intelligence, it turned out, were far more strongly correlated than genetics and intelligence.

Blum writes:

The foundlings were less determined, less interested, less willing to explore… One problem was that no one was interested in them, [Goldfarb] said. The caretakers seemed indifferent. But was that surprising? Goldfarb asked. Is an adult ever interested in a child who doesn’t stir his heart? An odd kind of chicken or egg issue underlies that query. Does affection for another person create interest in him or does interest lead to affection? When it came to the foundlings, Goldfarb had an idea that interest and affection twined together, tight as a rope, almost inseparably. All of us, even as babies, are a bundle of feelings and desires, he said. Our positive emotions grow best in an interactive sense, fostered by how we react to others and how they respond to us. A baby, a child, even an adult, needs at least one person interested and responsive. We grow best in soil cultivated by someone who thinks we matter.

This brings us back to Harlow. Building on these compelling but fragmentary insights, he advanced a robust and holistic theory of how profoundly our formative interactions and attachments shape our destiny, and then he set out to derive definitive evidence. To prove the importance of parental affection, he would demonstrate the effects of its absence and, even more dramatically, of its opposite.

Blum chronicles the clever, if cruel, twist Harlow put on his wire-mother experiments:

The lab team built what Harry called evil or “monster” mothers. There were four of them and they were cloth moms gone crazy. All of them had a soft-centered body for cuddling. But they were, all of them, booby traps. One was a “shaking” mother who rocked so violently that, Harry said, the teeth and bones of the infant chattered in unison. The second was an air-blast mother. She blew compressed air against the infant with such force that the baby looked, Harry said, as if it would be denuded. The third had an embedded steel frame that, on schedule or demand, would fling forward and hurl the infant monkey off the mother’s body. The fourth monster mother had brass spikes (blunt-tipped) tucked into her chest; these would suddenly, unexpectedly push against the clinging child.

What Harlow found was both heartbreaking and heartbreakingly understandable — rather than fleeing from the monstrous mothers, the babies tried harder to earn their affection. After every violent repulsion, they returned to the monsters, only to cling more tightly and coo more beseechingly, “expressing faith and love as if all were forgiven,” as Harlow put it.

Blum encapsulates the profound implications, revealing love to be a kind of primal addiction:

No experiment could have better demonstrated the depth and strength of a baby’s addiction for her parent. Or how terrifyingly vulnerable that addiction makes a child. These little monkeys would be frightened away by brass spike mom — and yet it was she they turned to for comfort. They had to; she was what they had. Here indeed was further evidence of that haven-of-security effect, for better and for worse. It doesn’t always keep you safe. If your mother is your only source of comfort and your mother is evil, what choices are left you in seeking safe harbor? No choice except to keep trying to cast anchor in the only harbor available. Harry and his team would find the same pattern when real mother monkeys were rejecting or abusive. The scientists marveled at “the desperate efforts the babies made to contact their mothers. No matter how abusive the mothers were, the babies persisted in returning.” They returned more often, they reached and clung and coaxed far more frequently than the children of normal mothers. The infants were so preoccupied with engaging their mothers that they had little energy for friends. The clinging babies’ energy was directed into their attempts to coax a little affection out at home. Sometimes the real monkey mothers did respond, gradually, more kindly. But while trying to reach mother, the little monkeys never had time to reach anyone else.

Harlow’s findings ushered in a tidal wave of change in psychology and instituted love as a proper and central subject in the study of human development. Generations of psychologists built on his work, including many of Harlow’s own students.

Among them was Steve Suomi, director of the National Institutes of Health lab of comparative ethology, who became interested in the interplay of nature and nurture in emotional development. In one ingenious experiment, he divided a sample of baby monkeys into two groups. Some remained with their biological mothers, who were selected to be unaffectionate and inattentive, while others were raised by what Suomi called “supermoms” — caretakers selected for their exceedingly affectionate nurturing style. Both groups of mothers cared for a variety of babies, including some naturally anxious and nervous ones.

Suomi found that the baby monkeys developed optimally under the care of the most loving mother, regardless of their biological connection. The effects were most dramatic on the nervous babies — with an unwaveringly affectionate mother, they grew calmer and became nurturers themselves, but with a neurotic mother, they grew even more nervous, fearful, and anxious to explore their environment.

There are several reminders in that elegant NIH experiment: that we need not grow up to be our mothers; that we may not want to; that it’s not easy to change. And that it may be unfair to load all our expectations and needs onto one parent, anyway. With the best intentions in the world, one person may not be able — or intended — to give a child everything he or she needs. The extended family, even the right child care provider may be exactly what’s needed.

As it turns out, this is true not only of parent-child relationships but of all intimate attachments — Esther Perel has written elegantly about the comparable perils of placing all of one’s expectations on one’s romantic partner. But since we seek out romantic partners largely on the basis of emotional patterning laid out in childhood , even this can be traced to Harlow’s legacy.

Blum encapsulates the heart of his work and its enduring implications:

There is no requirement for angelic perfection in parenting. The requirement is just to stay in there. Harry’s research tells us that love is work. So do all the studies that follow. The nature of love is about paying attention to the people who matter, about still giving when you are too tired to give. Be a mother who listens, a father who cuddles, a friend who calls back, a helping neighbor, a loving child. That emphasis on love in our everyday lives may be the best of that quiet revolution in psychology, the one that changed the way we think about love and relationship almost without our noticing that had happened. We take for granted now that parents should hug their children, that relationships are worth the time, that taking care of each other is part of the good life. It is such a good foundation that it’s almost astonishing to consider how recent it is. For that foundation under our feet we owe a debt to Harry Harlow and to all the scientists who believed and worked toward a psychology of the heart. At the end, in Harry’s handiwork, there’s nothing sentimental about love, no sunlit clouds and glory notes—it’s a substantial, earthbound connection, grounded in effort, kindness, and decency. Learning to love, Harry liked to say, is really about learning to live. Perhaps everyday affection seems a small facet of love. Perhaps, though, it is the modest, steady responses that see us through day after day, that stretch into a life of close and loving relationships. Or, as Harry Harlow wrote to a friend, “Perhaps one should always be modest when talking about love.”

Love at Goon Park is a tremendously pleasurable and revelatory read in its totality. Complement it with young Barack Obama on what his mother taught him about love , Iris Murdoch on how love gives meaning to human existence , and Erich Fromm on what is keeping us from mastering the art of loving .

— Published July 7, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/07/love-at-goon-park-harry-harlow-deborah-blum/ —

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An infant monkey clinging to its terry cloth “mother.”

After long periods of complete isolation and maternal deprivation, which produced disturbed behaviors, experimented with monkey “group psychotherapy.” After being placed in a zoo, the monkeys began to play together and groom one another, but they reverted to their abnormal behaviors when they were returned to Harlow’s laboratory.

The first love of the human infant is for his mother. The tender intimacy of this attachment is such that it is sometimes regarded as a sacred or mystical force, an instinct incapable of analysis. No doubt such compunctions, along with the obvious obstacles in the way of objective study, have hampered experimental observation of the bonds between child and mother.

Though the data are thin, the theoretical literature on the subject is rich. Psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists commonly hold that the infant’s love is learned through the association of the mother’s face, body and other physical characteristics with the alleviation of internal biological tensions, particularly hunger and thirst. Traditional psychoanalysts have tended to emphasize the role of attaching and sucking at the breast as the basis for affectional development. . . .

Now it is difficult, if not impossible, to use human infants as subjects for the studies necessary to break through the present speculative impasse. . . . Clearly research into the infant-mother relationship has need of a more suitable laboratory animal. We believe we have found it in the infant monkey. For the past several years our group at the Primate Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin has been employing baby rhesus monkeys in a study that we believe has begun to yield significant insights into the origin of the infant’s love for his mother. . . .

We have sought to compare the importance of nursing and all associated activities with that of simple bodily contact in engendering the infant monkey’s attachment to its mother. For this purpose we contrived two surrogate mother monkeys. One is a bare welded-wire cylindrical form surmounted by a wooden head with a crude face. In the other the welded wire is cushioned by a sheathing of terry cloth. We placed eight newborn monkeys in individual cages, each with equal access to a cloth and a wire mother. Four of the infants received their milk from one mother and four from the other. . . .

The monkeys in the two groups drank the same amount of milk and gained weight at the same rate. But the two mothers proved to be by no means psychologically equivalent. . . . Records made automatically showed that both groups of infants spent far more time climbing and clinging on their cloth-covered mothers than they did on their wire mothers. . . .

These results attest to the importance—possibly the overwhelming importance—of bodily contact and the immediate comfort it supplies in forming the infant’s attachment for its mother. . . .

The time that the infant monkeys spent cuddling on their surrogate mothers was a strong but perhaps not conclusive index of emotional attachment. Would they also seek the inanimate mother for comfort and security when they were subjected to emotional stress? With this question in mind we exposed our monkey infants to the stress of fear by presenting them with strange objects, for example, a mechanical teddy bear which moved forward, beating a drum. Whether the infants had nursed from the wire or the cloth mother, they overwhelmingly sought succor from the cloth one; this differential in behavior was enhanced with the passage of time and the accrual of experience. . . .

Thus all the objective tests we have been able to devise agree in showing that the infant monkey’s relationship to its surrogate mother is a full one. Comparison with the behavior of infant monkeys raised by their real mothers confirms this view. Like our experimental monkeys, these infants spend many hours a day clinging to their mothers, and run to them for comfort or reassurance when they are frightened. The deep and abiding bond between mother and child appears to be essentially the same, whether the mother is real or a cloth surrogate. . . .

The depth and persistence of attachment to the mother depend not only on the kind of stimuli that the young animal receives but also on when it receives them. . . . Clinical experience with human beings indicates that people who have been deprived of affection in infancy may have difficulty forming affectional ties in later life. From preliminary experiments with our monkeys we have also found that their affectional responses develop, or fail to develop, according to a similar pattern.

Early in our investigation we had segregated four infant monkeys as a general control group, denying them physical contact either with a mother surrogate or with other monkeys. After about eight months we placed them in cages with access to both cloth and wire mothers. . . .

In the open-field test these “orphan” monkeys derived far less assurance from the cloth mothers than did the other infants. The deprivation of physical contact during their first eight months had plainly affected the capacity of these infants to develop the full and normal pattern of affection. . . . The long period of maternal deprivation had evidently left them incapable of forming a lasting affectional tie. . . .

The effects of maternal separation and deprivation in the human infant have scarcely been investigated, in spite of their implications concerning child-rearing practices. . . .

Above and beyond demonstration of the surprising importance of contact comfort as a prime requisite in the formation of an infant’s love for its mother—and the discovery of the unimportant or nonexistent role of the breast and act of nursing—our investigations have established a secure experimental approach to this realm of dramatic and subtle emotional relationships. The further exploration of the broad field of research that now opens up depends merely upon the availability of infant monkeys. We expect to extend our researches by undertaking the study of the mother’s (and even the father’s!) love for the infant, using real monkey infants or infant surrogates. Finally, with such techniques established, there appears to be no reason why we cannot at some future time investigate the fundamental neurophysiological and biochemical variables underlying affection and love.

Source: Harry F. Harlow, “Love in Infant Monkeys,” 200 (June 1959):68, 70, 72-73, 74.

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Harlow’s Monkey Experiment – The Bond between Babies and Mothers

Harry Harlow was an American psychologist whose studies were focused on the effects of maternal separation, dependency, and social isolation on both mental and social development.

Objective of the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment

The idea came to Harlow when he was developing the Wisconsin General Testing Apparatus or the WGTA to study the mental processes of primates, which include memory, cognition and learning. As he developed his tests, he realized that the monkeys he worked with were slowly learning how to develop strategies around his tests.

Harlow had the idea that infant monkeys who are separated from their mothers at a very early age (within 90 days) can easily cope with a surrogate, because the bond with the biological mother has not yet been established. Furthermore, he also wanted to learn whether the bond is established because of pure nourishment of needs (milk), or if it involves other factors.

How did the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment work?

Results of the harlow monkey experiment.

Furthermore, the results of the second experiment showed that while the baby monkeys in both groups consumed the same amount of milk from their “mother”, the babies who grew up with the terry cloth mother exhibited emotional attachment and what is considered as normal behaviour when presented with stressful variables. Whenever they felt threatened, they would stay close to the terry cloth mother and cuddle with it until they were calm.

Significance of the Harlow’s Monkey Experiment

Moreover, it was found that the establishment of bond between baby and mother is not purely dependent on the satisfaction of one’s physiological needs (warmth, safety, food) , but also emotional (acceptance, love, affection).

Chapter 1 . MOTHER LOVE: THE WORK OF HARRY HARLOW

MOTHER LOVE:

THE WORK OF HARRY HARLOW

Victoria Cross, University of California – Davis

This activity focuses on the work of Harry Harlow and contains much original footage from 1959. After considering the concept of the infant-mother bond and some of the ethical considerations around studying this topic, you will review the dominant theories and observe the set up and experiment results of Harlow’s actual study.

There are no text references for this activity.

What Is an Infant’s Love for Its Mother?

Take a moment to think about the strong emotional bond or attachment that forms between most infants and their parents.

The primary caregiver is the person or people who care for an infant. This person can be of either gender and need not be biologically related to the infant. For the most part, the research of the past 50 years has focused on mothers as the primary caregivers. Since this activity features Harry Harlow’s historically significant work from 1959, this activity will focus on the bond between the infant and its mother.

Question 1.1

Studying an infant’s love for its mother: ethical considerations.

A mouse in a maze where it is clearly being studied for its ability to find the cheese.

Conducting research on something as delicate as an infant’s love for its mother is an area that is rife with ethical considerations and concerns. For example, no institutional review board would allow a researcher to remove an infant from its mother in order to study the impact on the emotional bond.

However, the topic is very important in understanding human development. Therefore, researchers must consider alternate ways of answering their research questions without violating research ethics or participants’ trust.

One option would be to take advantage of naturally occurring situations in which infants and their primary caregivers are separated. Such naturally occurring situations may include adoption, foster care, and hospitalization.

Another option would be to select an animal model that resembles humans in the behavior being studied. Conducting research on animals allows researchers to exert more control over the experiences of the animal than can be exerted over humans.

However, the challenge is that no animal completely resembles humans so any information gathered from animal research might not generalize to human behavior.

An Introduction to Harlow’s Work

Play this video from 1959 to listen to Harry Harlow introduce his work with infant rhesus monkeys.

Introduction to Harlow’s Work: Historical Context

In the clip that you just watched, Harlow states, “Some people believe that this bond is built upon nursing.” This statement is a direct reference to behaviorism , which was a dominant theory in psychology from the 1930s through the 1960s. According to the tenets of behaviorism, behaviors that are reinforced are likely to be repeated. Food acts as the primary reinforcement because all animals need food, and research has repeatedly shown that animals will work hard to obtain food.

For an infant, establishing contact with its mother is reinforced when the infant is being fed. According to behaviorism, the infant will repeat the behaviors that bring and keep its mother close (e.g., crying, cooing and smiling while being held). Keep in mind that behaviorism does not attempt to explore the emotional component of this relationship.

Question 1.2

Meet the ‘mothers’.

In this study, Harlow compared two characteristics while holding all other variables constant. This allowed him to separate the influences of contact comfort and nursing on the formation of the infant emotional bond. Be aware that Harlow had complete control of the characteristics of the surrogate mothers.

Play the video. Then fill in the table below by selecting the correct descriptions for the levels of each of the two variables.

Contact Comfort
Wire	jIB26c3L1YGnz6H2LoWZnfATEgRQfKWOIZaOSEZSin0DY/YR5zn4jTuidIMWa6/LJ+olpKidBrQr9S4CidIBWQ==
Cloth-covered	ISRyy9P6gFFnOh3jeqN1f5cHhjZqm5Q7rzBXDrHrycbP/e037h67Kphinnu4cse8aKotHTLT3edCaOzO53ME1Q==
Nursing
With bottle	VWr+bAbvmSXigULUfC5/QTtQUPqSAUXaYPGlYSBt0kEsBEXbMQFRYQ==
Without bottle	1/rgOKGkuFF5ZVtjW5ipWYav1KAIElMe66zVpEjYbdIDC5SH2q546Q==

The Experiment

The infant rhesus monkeys were taken from their mothers at birth and raised in isolated cages. They each had constant access to a cloth mother and a wire mother. The infants were divided into two groups:

Group 1: nursed on wire mother only
Group 2: nursed on cloth mother only

Harlow analyzed the infants’ behaviors toward the surrogate mothers to evaluate the formation of the emotional attachment bond. If behaviorism accounts for the formation of this emotional bond, then the important variable would be nursing. However, if Harlow’s prediction was correct, then the primary variable responsible for forming an emotional bond would be contact comfort .

Now, it’s time to make a prediction. In the table below, choose the predictions made by behaviorism and Harlow's theory for each experimental group.

	Prediction from behaviorism	Harlow's prediction
Nursed on wire mother	Cv7CY3k5kynbXWsYxLCWJKFMDhqUTJdEJbwA8lKEZlUQX1ItjV6X7blYVycPuQcG6ekUdSkwU3rg4G0g	3esLu0ED1IRB604Bt7qiG9BJbVVHZMlv54sKOQNeuUYQ4ZkobJIwSY2Gv0wzN/DKnkigMMmzRUE=
Nursed on cloth mother	3esLu0ED1IRB604Bt7qiG9BJbVVHZMlv54sKOQNeuUYQ4ZkobJIwSY2Gv0wzN/DKnkigMMmzRUE=	3esLu0ED1IRB604Bt7qiG9BJbVVHZMlv54sKOQNeuUYQ4ZkobJIwSY2Gv0wzN/DKnkigMMmzRUE=

The Results

	Prediction from behaviorism	Harlow's prediction
Nursed on wire mother	wire mother is preferred	cloth mother is preferred
Nursed on cloth mother	cloth mother is preferred	cloth mother is preferred

From your predictions on the previous screen, you can see that both theories predict the same outcome for the infant rhesus monkeys that nursed on the cloth mothers. The critical comparison will be for the group that nursed on the wire mother. Behaviorism predicts that the monkeys in Group 1 would prefer the wire mother that nurses. Harlow suspected that the monkeys would prefer the cloth mother that provides contact comfort .

Play the video to observe one of the monkeys from Group 1.

Is This Love?

The infant rhesus monkey spends time on the cloth-covered monkey, but is this love? To explore this bond even further, Harlow devised a way to study how the infant monkeys act when they are frightened.

Play the video to find out what happened.

Harlow was particularly interested in evidence that proved that contact with the mother gives the infant security. Please note which evidence in the video clip shows that the infant gained security from contact with its mother.

A Secure Base

Both human and rhesus monkey infants have much to learn about the world around them. They learn by interacting with the world and exploring their environment. If exploration is disrupted, infants fail to gather information about their world and in effect, fail to learn and grow.

Infants must balance exploration with risk. An unfamiliar location is potentially dangerous, and a normal infant would be hesitant to explore it alone. A sign of a secure relationship with a primary caregiver is the ability to use that caregiver as a secure base. A secure base gives infants the confidence to explore the environment. These confident infants will occasionally check back to ensure that the caregivers are still available.

Play the video to find out if a cloth mother that has provided contact comfort and security from frightening machines can also act as a secure base in an unfamiliar location.

Rethink an Earlier Response

At the beginning of this activity, you wrote the following answer to this question:

Question: How do you think the infant-mother bond forms? What do you think forms the basis of an infant’s love for its mother?

Your answer: No response entered.

Assessment: Check Your Understanding

Activity results are being submitted...

Three Lessons From Wire Mother

Fear and love shape infant development..

Posted June 23, 2018 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

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The mid-20th century was the heyday for studying the force that love has on shaping human personality and social behavior. In my last post on infant separation, I outlined the contributions of John Bowlby and his work on attachment .

American primatologist Harry Harlow offered the following: Baby monkeys cannot live on food alone, but need physical contact and affectional love.

Here is the historical context: The behaviorists and the psychoanalytic school were arguing about the mechanisms that connect an infant to his mother. Namely, they focused on feeding and food. The upshot, these theoreticians thought that if you feed a baby, he will associate you with food and develop positive feelings for you, the feeder.

Harlow wondered if humans could be so reduced. So he set up his now-classic experiment with “wire” and “cloth” mothers.

In these experiments, he was addressing, “What is the nature of love?”

Wire mother was a wire effigy of a “mom,” complete with a nipple and bottle. “She” was for food provision.

Cloth mother was soft, designed for clinging, but provided no food.

Q: When you frighten a baby monkey, who does she run to? Wire mother who had been feeding her, or cloth mother who has provided nothing but “contact comfort”?

A: Cloth mother. No food, but something physically comforting to cling to.

Later experiments showed that infant monkeys would open a door hour after hour just to see cloth mother through a small window.

These experiments (and the films thereof) absolutely changed the way we saw parental care, and completely overthrew what John Watson, famous behaviorist , had warned us: “There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as though they were young adults … Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap … Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made an extraordinary good job of a difficult task…”.

I used to show the Harlow films in class. I don’t anymore because they routinely make students cry. There is nothing as pathetic as a pink-faced baby monkey getting experimentally frightened only to cling inconsolably to a fake mother.

But the message—together with the work of John Bowlby —is absolutely clear: You cannot raise baby primates (like humans), with material provisions alone, especially in situations of high fear .

What have we learned from a rather poorly-made wire model of a “mother monkey”?

1. Fear and anxiety shape developing humans, and a key role for caregivers is to help the young child regulate it.

2. Contact comfort is imperative for this emotion regulation .

3. Material resources are not enough.

To separate young children from their caregivers and group-house them in fear-inducing contexts is one of the cruelest, large-scale human experiments ever conducted.

Patricia Hawley, Ph.D. , is a full professor at Texas Tech University. She researches how power and inequity manifest in groups.

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Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments: Monkeying Around With Love

Have You Ever?

You’re helping your uncle Brian watch his children at an aquarium. A fire alarm goes off, and scares your youngest cousin Cordelia. Cordelia runs from your side to her father and tightly clasps his leg. She’s on the verge of tears. You’re not quite confident she fully understands Brian’s explanation of the fire alarm, but you don’t stick around to find out, instead seeking out the two middle schoolers who are already heading towards the nearest exit. By the time you’ve reconvened outside, Cordelia seems much more calm and is happily picking at the grass while you all wait for the all-clear from the fire department.

When scared, Cordelia sought comfort from her father rather than you, even though you were closer. She has a stronger attachment to Brian, so she sought him out. Once she had received some contact comfort from him, she was able to go back to playing and having fun.

Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments

Harlow’s experiments provided empirical proof that primary attachment bonds are vital to a developing creature. Contact comfort plays a much more important role in the mother-child relationship than sustenance does. Furthermore, there’s a time limit for when such bonds need to be forged without causing permanent emotional, mental, and social issues.

The Experiment

In the 1930s, Harlow was running experiments with rhesus macaques concerning learning development. To this end, he chose to raise them in a nursery setting rather than with their mothers. While Harlow and his associates could care for the physical needs of the baby monkeys, there was no denying that they regularly behaved much differently than those raised by their mothers. These socially isolated infants were reclusive, clung to their cloth diapers, and often showed signs of fear or aggressiveness. These observations, along with the later growing general debate over a mother’s role in her child’s development, would inspire Harlow to conduct his famous experiments.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Harlow investigated the attachment bonds we call love with his rhesus monkeys as test subjects. His most famous experiment involved separating an infant from its mother a few hours after birth and letting it be “raised” by two “surrogate mothers.” The two mothers were made out of wire and wood, but one had a soft cloth covering. In one group, only the cloth mother had a bottle attached to it. For the other, only the wire mother provided the baby sustenance. According to the prevailing beliefs of the time, the infant should have shown an attachment for whichever mother held the bottle, but this wasn’t the case. In all groups, the infants overwhelmingly preferred the cloth mother. Those with the nourishing wire mother would only approach it to feed and then return to their cloth mother.

Later experiments - “open-field tests” and “fear tests” - showed that when frightened, infants would seek comfort from their cloth mothers, clinging to them and eventually calming down. Those without their surrogate mother or those with only a wire mother present would stay fearful, frequently huddling in a ball, rocking themselves, sucking their thumbs, or screeching in terror.

Harlow also investigated how different lengths of isolation affected rhesus macaques’ abilities to socialize with peers. Subjects were isolated for months and even years. He found that 90 days was the critical period. Subjects exhibited dramatic, debilitating behavior but, when integrated with controls of the same age, slowly started to adapt and eventually show normal behavior. After the critical period passes, no amount of exposure to surrogate mothers or peers can cause the subjects to fully alter their behavior nor make up for the emotional damage suffered. The longer subjects were isolated, the more debilitating their behavior became. In some cases, severely isolated subjects developed emotional anorexia upon reintegration with their peers and subsequently died.

The idea of comfort contact isn’t a radical one today, but it was during the time of Harlow’s experiments. There were a number of records and instances of human children developing poorly socially, emotionally, and psychologically as a result of what appeared to be a lack of parental attachments, but there was no hard proof. The popular opinion of the day was that parents should only care for their children’s physical needs. Cuddling was on par with coddling and was believed to cause children to become too dependent. Harlow provided the necessary evidence to dispute such beliefs via his experiments. Institutionalized child care was shown to be detrimental to children.

This is why in issues of guardian rights, the child’s preferences should be prioritized over which adult can provide the most financially. Adoption is championed as superior over other arrangements because it provides the permanence needed for attachment bonds to develop. Harlow showed that love doesn’t develop from simply caring for the physical needs of a child: it comes from providing a feeling of safety and comfort. A father can play just as critical of a role in his child’s development as the mother. You don’t need to be a biological parent to truly care for a child. An infant raised by guardians rather than their biological mother is not guaranteed to suffer from such an arrangement.

Harlow’s experiments showed that parenting and mentorship isn’t limited to adults. Peers can be instrumental in helping each other lead healthy, happy lives. People develop a variety of attachment bonds of varying strength and importance, but each bond plays an important role in their development. Your words and actions can help make others feel safe and wanted or strange and unnecessary. You can help heal others or further scar them. It’s entirely up to you, so which would you prefer to be: a cold lump of metal or a warm bundle of security?

Think Further

What are some other ways we seek comfort from others?
Who are the people and what are the things you seek out when frightened? Why?
How can we promote the development of healthy attachment bonds?

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The nature of love: Harlow, Bowlby and Bettelheim on affectionless mothers

Affiliations.

1 Leiden University, Netherlands.
2 Leiden University, Netherlands, and University of Magallanes, Chile.
3 Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands.
PMID: 31969024
PMCID: PMC7433398
DOI: 10.1177/0957154X19898997

Harry Harlow, famous for his experiments with rhesus monkeys and cloth and wire mothers, was visited by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby and by child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim in 1958. They made similar observations of Harlow's monkeys, yet their interpretations were strikingly different. Bettelheim saw Harlow's wire mother as a perfect example of the 'refrigerator mother', causing autism in her child, while Bowlby saw Harlow's results as an explanation of how socio-emotional development was dependent on responsiveness of the mother to the child's biological needs. Bettelheim's solution was to remove the mother, while Bowlby specifically wanted to involve her in treatment. Harlow was very critical of Bettelheim, but evaluated Bowlby's work positively.

Keywords: Attachment; Bettelheim; Bowlby; Harlow; autism; mother love; refrigerator mother; wire mother.

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Harlow’s Monkey Experiments: 3 Findings About Attachment

When that need is met, the infant develops a secure attachment style; however, when that need is not met, the infant can develop an attachment disorder.

In this post, we’ll briefly explore attachment theory by looking at Harlow’s monkey experiments and how those findings relate to human behavior and attachment styles. We’ll also look at some of the broader research that resulted from Harlow’s experiments.

Before we begin, I have to warn you that Harlow’s experiments are distressing and can be upsetting. Nowadays, his experiments are considered unethical and would most likely not satisfy the requirements of an ethical board. However, knowing this, the findings of his research do provide insight into the important mammalian bond that exists between infant and parent.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive Relationships Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients build healthy, life-enriching relationships.

This Article Contains:

Harlow’s experiments: a brief summary, three fascinating findings & their implications, its connection to love and attachment theory, follow-up and related experiments, criticisms of harlow’s experiments, ethical considerations of harlow’s experiments, relevant positivepsychology.com resources, a take-home message.

Harry Harlow was trained as a psychologist, and in 1930 he was employed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His areas of expertise were in infant–caregiver relationships, infant dependency and infant needs, and social deprivation and isolation. He is also well known for his research using rhesus monkeys.

Maternal surrogates: Food versus comfort

For his experiments, Harlow (1958) separated infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers. He then constructed two surrogate ‘mothers’ for the infants: one surrogate made out of metal but that provided milk through an artificial nipple, the other surrogate covered in soft, fluffy material but that didn’t offer food.

The first surrogate delivered food but provided no comfort; the second did not deliver food, but the rhesus infants were able to cuddle with it.

When both surrogates were placed in the infants’ cages, Harlow found the surrogates satisfied different needs of the rhesus infants. The wire surrogate satisfied the infants’ primary need for food. However, when Harlow made a loud noise to frighten the rhesus infants, they ran to the second, fluffy surrogate for comfort.

Maternal surrogates: A secure base from which to explore

In subsequent experiments, Harlow (1958) showed that the fluffy surrogate acted as a secure base from which rhesus infants could explore an unfamiliar environment or objects. In these experiments, the infants, along with their fluffy surrogates, were placed in an unfamiliar environment like a new cage.

These infants would explore the environment and return to the surrogate for comfort if startled. In contrast, when the infants were placed in the new environment without a surrogate, they would not explore but rather lie on the floor, paralyzed, rocking back and forth, sucking their thumbs.

The absence of a maternal surrogate

Harlow also studied the development of rhesus monkeys that were not exposed to a fluffy surrogate or had no surrogate at all. The outcome for these infants was extremely negative. Rhesus infants raised with a milk-supplying metal surrogate had softer feces than infants raised with a milk-supplying fluffy surrogate.

Harlow posited that the infants with the metal surrogates suffered from psychological disturbances, which manifested in digestive problems.

Rhesus infants raised with no surrogates showed the same fearful behavior when placed in an unfamiliar environment as described above, except that their behavior persisted even when a surrogate was placed in the environment with them. They also demonstrated less exploratory behavior and less curiosity than infants raised with surrogates from a younger age.

When these infants were approximately a year old, they were introduced to a surrogate. In response, they behaved fearfully and violently. They would rock continuously, scream, and attempt to escape their cages. Fortunately, these behaviors dissipated after a few days. The infants approached, explored, and clung to the surrogate, but never to the same extent as infants raised with a fluffy surrogate from a younger age.

Primary drives are ones that ensure a creature’s survival, such as the need for food or water. Harlow suggests that there is another drive, ‘contact comfort,’ which the fluffy surrogate satisfied.

The ‘contact comfort’ drive does more than just satisfy a need for love and comfort. From Harlow’s experiments, it seems that these fluffy surrogates offered a secure, comforting base from which infants felt confident enough to explore unfamiliar environments and objects, and to cope with scary sounds.

Conclusions from Harlow’s work were limited to the role of maternal surrogates because the surrogates also provided milk – a function that only female mammals can perform. Consequently, it was posited that human infants have a strong need to form an attachment to a maternal caregiver (Bowlby, 1951). However, subsequent research has shown that human infants do not only form an attachment with:

a female caregiver,
a caregiver that produces milk, or
one caregiver (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964).

The bond between human infant and caregiver is not limited to only mothers, but can extend to anyone who spends time with the infant. Schaffer and Emerson (1964) studied the emotional responses of 60 infants to better understand their attachments and behaviors.

They found that at the start of the study, most of the infants had formed an attachment with a single person, normally the mother (71%), and that just over a third of the infants had formed attachments to multiple people, sometimes over five.

However, when the infants were 18 months, only 13% had an attachment to a single person, and most of the infants had two or more attachments. The other people with whom infants formed an attachment included:

Grandparents
Siblings and family members
People who were not part of their family, including neighbors or other children

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Harlow’s experiment on rhesus monkeys shed light on the importance of the relationship between caregiver and infant. This relationship satisfies other needs besides food and thirst, and the behavior of rhesus infants differs depending on whether they were raised (1) with or without a surrogate and (2) whether that surrogate was a fluffy (i.e., comforting) or metal (i.e., non-comforting) one.

Widespread thinking at the time was that children only needed their physical needs to be satisfied in order to grow up into healthy, well-adjusted adults (Bowlby, 1951, 1958). Harlow’s work, however, suggests that the caregiver satisfies another need of the infant: the need for love.

It is difficult to know whether the infant monkeys truly loved the surrogate mothers because Harlow could not ask them directly or measure the feeling of love using equipment.

But there is no doubt that the presence (or absence) of a surrogate mother deeply affected the behavior of the infant monkeys, and monkeys with surrogate mothers displayed more normal behavior than those without.

Additionally, Harlow’s work also showed that infant monkeys looked for comfort in the fluffy surrogate mother, even if that surrogate mother never provided food.

From this research, we can conclude that infants feel an attachment toward their caregiver. That attachment is experienced as what we know to be ‘love.’ This attachment seems to be important for a variety of reasons, such as:

Feeling safe when afraid or in an unfamiliar environment
Responding in a loving, comforting way to the needs and feelings of infants

The infant’s need to form an attachment was not considered a primary need until 1952, when Bowlby argued that this basic need was one that infants feel instinctually (Bowlby & World Health Organization, 1952).

Bowlby’s work formed the basis of attachment theory – the theory that the relationship between infant and caregiver affects the infant’s psychological development.

The contributions from these researchers include:

The emotional needs of infants are critical to healthy development and survival
Parents play an important role besides merely satisfying the physical needs of an infant to ensure survival

Maternal deprivation

John Bowlby (1958) argued that maternal deprivation has extremely negative effects on the psychological and emotional development of children.

He was especially interested in extreme forms of parental deprivation, such as children who were homeless, abandoned, or institutionalized and therefore had no contact with their parents.

From his research, Bowlby argued that satisfying the physiological needs of the child did not ensure healthy development and that the effects of maternal deprivation were grave and difficult to reverse.

Specifically, he argued that how the caregiver behaves in response to the behavior and feelings of an infant plays an important role in infants’ psychological and emotional development (Bowlby, 1958).

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Attachment styles in infants

How the caregiver responds to the infant is known as sensitive responsiveness (Ainsworth et al., 1978). The fluffy surrogate mothers in Harlow’s experiment were not responsive, obviously; however, their presence, the material used to cover them, and their shape allowed the rhesus infants to cling to them, providing comfort, albeit a basic, unresponsive one.

The findings from research by Harlow and Bowlby led to pioneering work by Mary Ainsworth on infant–mother attachments and attachment theory in infants. Specifically, she developed an alternative method to study child–parent attachments, using the ‘strange situation procedure’:

The parent and child are placed together in an unfamiliar room.
At some point, a (female) stranger enters the room, chats to the parent and plays with/chats to the infant.
The parent leaves the room, and the child and stranger are alone together.
The parent returns to the room, and the stranger leaves. The parent chats and plays with the child.
The parent leaves the room, and the child is alone.
The stranger returns and tries to chat and play with the child.

Depending on how the child behaved at the separation and introduction of the parent and the stranger, respectively, the attachment style between the infant and mother was classified as either secure, anxious-avoidant, or anxious-resistant.

For more reading on Mary Ainsworth, Harlow, and Bowlby, you can find out more about their work in our What is Attachment Theory? article.

Harlow’s studies on dependency in monkeys – Michael Baker

Subsequent research has questioned some of Harlow’s original findings and theories (Rutter, 1979). Some of these criticisms include:

Harlow’s emphasis on the importance of a single, maternal figure in the child–parent relationship. As mentioned earlier, children can develop important relationships with different caregivers who do not need to be female/maternal figures (Schaffer & Emerson, 1964).
The difference between a bond and an attachment. Children can form attachments without forming bonds. For example, a child might follow a teacher (i.e., an example of attachment behavior) and yet not have any deep bonds or relationships with other children. This suggests that these two types of relationships might be slightly different or governed by different processes.
Other factors can also influence the relationship between child and parent, and their attachment. One such factor is the temperament of the parent or the child (Sroufe, 1985). For example, an anxious parent or child might show behavior that suggests an insecure attachment style. Another factor is that behaviors that suggest attachment do not necessarily mean that the parent is better responding to the child’s needs. For example, children are more likely to follow a parent when in an unfamiliar environment. This behavior does not automatically imply that the child’s behavior is a result of the way the parent has responded in the past; instead, this is just how children behave.

One of Harlow’s most controversial claims was that peers were an adequate substitute for maternal figures. Specifically, he argued that monkeys that were raised with other similarly aged monkeys behaved the same as monkeys that were raised with their parents. In other words, the relationship with a parent is not unique, and peers can meet these ‘parental’ needs.

However, subsequent research showed that rhesus monkeys raised with peers were shyer, explored less, and occupied lower roles in monkey hierarchies (Suomi, 2008; Bastian, Sponberg, Suomi, & Higley, 2002).

Importantly, Harlow’s experiments are not evidence that there should be no separation between parent and infant. Such a scenario would be almost impossible in a normal environment today. Frequent separations between parent and infant are normal; however, it is critical that the infant can re-establish contact with the parent.

If contact is successfully re-established, then the bond between parent and child is reinforced.

Impact on psychological theories about human behavior

Harlow’s research on rhesus monkeys demonstrated the important role that parents have in our development and that humans have other salient needs that must be met to achieve happiness.

Harlow’s work added weight to the arguments put forward by Sigmund Freud (2003) that our relationship with our parents can affect our psychological development and behavior later in our lives.

Harlow’s work also influenced research on human needs. For example, Maslow (1943) argued that humans have a hierarchy of needs that must be met in order to experience life satisfaction and happiness.

The first tier comprises physiological needs, such as hunger and thirst, followed by the second tier of needs such as having a secure place to live. The third tier describes feelings of love and belonging, such as having emotional bonds with other people. Maslow argued that self-actualization could only be reached when all of our needs were met.

Harlow continued to perform experiments on rhesus monkeys, including studying the effects of partial to complete social deprivation. It is highly unlikely that Harlow’s experiments would pass the rigorous requirements of any ethics committee today. The separation of an infant from their parent, especially intending to study the effect of this separation, would be considered cruel.

Kobak (2012) outlines the experiments performed by Harlow, and it is immediately obvious that many of these animals experienced severe emotional distress because of their living conditions.

In the partial isolation experiments, Harlow isolated a group of 56 monkeys from other monkeys; although they could hear and see the other monkeys, they were prevented from interacting with or touching them. These monkeys developed aggressive and severely disturbed behavior, such as staring into space, repetitive behaviors, and self-harm through chewing and tearing at their flesh.

Furthermore, the monkeys that were raised in isolation did not display normal mating behavior and failed in mating.

The complete social deprivation experiments were especially cruel. In these experiments, they raised the monkeys in a box, alone, with no sensory contact with other monkeys. They never saw, heard, or came into contact with any other monkeys.

The only contact that they had was with a human experimenter, but this was through a one-way screen and remote control; there was no visual input of another living creature.

Harlow described this experience as the ‘pit of despair.’ Monkeys raised in this condition for two years showed severely disturbed behavior, unable to interact with other monkeys, and efforts to reverse the effect of two years in isolation were unsuccessful.

Harlow considered this experiment as an analogy of what happens to children completely deprived of any social contact for the first few years of their lives.

The effects of Harlow’s experiments were not limited to only one generation of monkeys. In one of his studies, a set of rhesus monkeys raised with surrogates, rather than their own mothers, gave birth to their own infants.

Harlow observed that these parent-monkeys, which he termed ‘motherless monkeys,’ were dysfunctional parents. They either ignored their offspring or were extremely aggressive toward them. They raised two generations of monkeys to test the effect of parental deprivation.

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Harlow’s monkey experiments were cruel, but it would have been impossible to conduct the same experiments using human infants.

Furthermore, Harlow’s experiments helped shift attention to the important role that caregivers provide for children.

When Harlow was publishing his research, the medical fraternity believed that meeting the physical needs of children was enough to ensure a healthy child. In other words, if the child is fed, has water, and is kept warm and clean, then the child will develop into a healthy adult.

Harlow’s experiments showed that this advice was not true and that the emotional needs of infants are critical to healthy development.

With love, affection, and comfort, infants can develop into healthy adults.

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Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of attachment: A psychological study of the strange situation . Erlbaum.
Bastian, M. L., Sponberg, A. C., Suomi, S. J., & Higley, J. D. (2002). Long-term effects of infant rearing condition on the acquisition of dominance rank in juvenile and adult rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). Developmental Psychobiology , 42 , 44–51.
Bowlby, J. (1951). Maternal care and mental health . Columbia University Press.
Bowlby, J. (1958). The nature of the child’s tie to his mother. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis , 39 , 350–373.
Bowlby, J., & World Health Organization. (1952). Maternal care and mental health: A report prepared on behalf of the World Health Organization as a contribution to the United Nations programme for the welfare of homeless children . World Health Organization.
Colman, M. A. (2001). Oxford dictionary of psychology . Oxford University Press.
Freud, S. (2003). An outline of psychoanalysis . Penguin UK.
Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist , 13 (12), 673.
Kobak, R. (2012). Attachment and early social deprivation: Revisiting Harlow’s monkey studies. Developmental psychology: Revisiting the classic studies , S , 10–23.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review , 50 (4), 370–96.
Rutter, M. (1979). Maternal deprivation, 1972–1978: New findings, new concepts, new approaches. Child Development , 50 (2), 283–305.
Schaffer, H. R., & Emerson, P. E. (1964). The development of social attachments in infancy. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development , 29 (3), 1–77.
Sroufe, L. A. (1985). Attachment classification from the perspective of infant-caregiver relationships and infant temperament. Child Development , 56 (1), 1–14.
Suomi, S. J. (2008). Attachment in rhesus monkeys. In J. Cassidy & P. Shaver (Eds.), Handbook of attachment: Theory, research and clinical applications (pp. 173–191). Guilford Press.

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Parental attunement and attention also shape the architecture of the brain and the function of the nervous system. When a child does not encounter sufficient parental attunement, compassion, kindness, and empathy, they are deprived of experiences that foster the integration of the brain. This results in a dysregulated nervous system, which cannot produce regulated emotions, thoughts, behaviors, relationships, or bodily systems. The impeded integration causes internal distress, the symptoms of which include chronic illness, recurrent pain, poor relationships, and “mental health” conditions (which are health conditions).

The child (and subsequently insufficiently supported adult) tries to find relief through whatever means are available: numbing, acting out, withdrawing, overeating, substance abuse, dissociation, splitting, self-harm, etc. These are not “disorders” but *survival adaptations* demanded by the unsafe environment. The child/adult uses whatever survival adaptations are available; when they have better options, they use them.

When the dysregulated person receives sufficient psychosocial support, such as through truly therapeutic or other integrative relationships, the brain can integrate and the nervous system can regulate. People, like animals and plants, flourish in supportive environments. Fix the environment and the symptoms fade.

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Cover Story

Teaching contentious classics.

Animal Research
Conflict Resolution
Experimental Psychology
Intergroup Relations
Situational Personality

Last year marked the 50th anniversary of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority, an event that inspired a conference, many reflective papers, and a popular book of vitriolic criticism. Gina Perry’s Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments aimed to discredit Milgram’s research methods, his findings, his ethics, and the man himself. Reviewing the book and discussing it with Milgram scholars got me thinking yet again about the eternal dilemma for instructors and textbook writers: How much time should we devote to teaching the classics versus making way for new (and often yet-unreplicated) research, and how should we teach them? What should we do when the classics had flaws that would not permit their replication today, but yielded findings that still tell a good story?

In every generation, certain studies get planted in our books and lectures, and they tend to become rooted there. Over time it gets harder to decide how much to prune — let alone decide if it’s time to uproot them. We stop looking at the original studies closely, let alone critically; they just sit in our courses like grand historical monuments.

However, it’s good to reexamine them for two important reasons: One is for our own sakes, to refresh our memories and rethink their contributions; the other is for our students’ sakes. Students today are as eager to reject unflattering or counterintuitive portrayals of humanity as students were decades ago. Teaching the classics, therefore, means finding new ways of persuading students that these findings do apply to them, despite the errors or limitations of the original studies. I’d therefore like to examine the stories behind three classic studies in psychology: Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave study, Milgram’s obedience experiments, and Harry Harlow’s studies of wire and cloth mother monkeys.

Robbers Cave

To begin, I got down my graduate school bible, Basic Studies in Social Psychology , and reread Sherif’s “Superordinate Goals in the Reduction of Intergroup Conflict,” which had been published in a sociology journal in 1958. Between 1949 and 1954, Sherif and his colleagues used a Boy Scout camp called Robbers Cave to test their hypotheses about the origin and reduction of intergroup hostility and prejudice. They randomly assigned 11- and 12-year-old boys to one of two groups, the Eagles or the Rattlers, and set up a series of competitive activities that quickly generated “us–them” thinking and mutual animosity. Later, to undo the warfare they had thus created, they set up situations in which the boys had to work together to achieve a common goal.

Muzafer Sherif’s classic Robbers Cave studies focused on 11- and 12-year-old Boy Scout campers who were assigned to separate groups and placed in a series of competitive situations that fostered an “us–them” mentality.

As I reread the study, I realized the data were more limited than I had remembered and not as statistically “scientific” as would be required today. Most of the conclusions, Sherif wrote, “were reached on the basis of observational data”— confirmed by “sociometric choices and stereotype ratings.” He said, “Observations made after several superordinate goals were introduced showed a sharp decrease in name-calling and derogation of the outgroup common … in the contact situations without superordinate goals.” (By the way, there are unexpected discoveries in going back to read original studies. The “name-calling” in the Robbers Cave experiment is so charmingly outdated: In 1948, boys “derogated” each other with names like “stinkers” and “smart alecks.”)

Sherif did provide some numbers and percentages and a few chi squares, but this was a field study, with all of the uncontrollable variables that field studies can generate. Was everything hunky dory for the Eagles and Rattlers by the end of the study? The numbers of boys favorable toward their outgroup improved, but the majority of boys in each group apparently maintained their hostility toward each other.

Yet Robbers Cave was and remains important for its central ideas: At the time, most psychologists did not understand — and most laypeople don’t understand even today — that simply putting two competing, hostile groups together in the same room to, say, watch a movie, won’t reduce their antagonism; that competitive situations generate hostility and stereotyping of the outgroup; and that competition and hostility can be reversed, at least modestly, through cooperation in pursuit of shared goals. That’s the story of Robbers Cave: It was true then, and it’s true now. It was bold and innovative of Sherif to try to test these important hypotheses in a realistic situation outside the lab, and I don’t see any need for teachers to raise concerns about his methods with students in introductory psychology classes.

In fact, Robbers Cave generated a long line of experimental and field studies replicating the importance of superordinate goals. When Elliot Aronson went into the newly desegregated but hostile classrooms in Austin, Texas, where African American, Mexican American, and Anglo American children were at war with each other, Sherif was part of his mental set, strongly influencing his design of the jigsaw classroom. But Elliot did it right, using an experimental intervention and a control group. What a great coda to the Robbers Cave story — a direct link from Eagles and Rattlers, a made-up antipathy, to interethnic warfare in our schools, which is all too real and persisting.

The Shock Box

Teaching the lessons of Stanley Milgram’s experiments, of course, is a lot more complicated than teaching Sherif’s work. Phoebe Ellsworth (University of Michigan) recently told me that she surveyed her upper-level social psych course to find out how students had first heard about Milgram. Roughly half of them were first introduced to him through his work demonstrating obedience to authority and the power of the situation. The other half first heard about him as an example of how unethical social psychologists could be. The students who had been told about the “evil Milgram,” she said, mostly weren’t even told about the point of his experiment. “Pathetic,” she wrote to me. I agree.

Today, many psychological scientists note ethical lapses in Stanley Milgram’s “shock box” experiments on obedience, but his research continues to influence our understanding of the power that circumstances have over behavior.

Again, students need to keep the cultural context of the times in mind. In 1961, when Adolf Eichmann was claiming at his trial that he was “only following orders” in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust, Milgram began his effort to determine how many Americans would obey an authority figure when directly ordered to harm another human being. Participants came to the Yale University lab thinking they were part of an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning, and were instructed to administer increasing levels of shock to a “learner.” The learner was a confederate of Milgram who did not receive any shocks, but played his part convincingly: As the study continued, he shouted in pain and pleaded to be released, according to an arranged script. To almost everyone’s surprise at the time, some two-thirds of the participant “teachers” administered what they thought were the highest levels of shock, even though many were experiencing difficulty or distress doing so.

Milgram’s experiment produced a firestorm of protest about the possible psychological harm inflicted on the unwitting participants, and as a result, it could never be done today in its extreme version.

Some people hated the method and others the message, and still do — which is why debate about it continues. In her book, Gina Perry, an Australian psychologist and journalist, interviewed everyone she could find who was connected to the original study, along with Milgram’s critics and defenders. She pored through the archives of Milgram’s voluminous unpublished papers. Her goal was to argue that the experiments were flawed and unethical, in order to counteract what she considers Milgram’s “bleak view of human nature.”

Reinvestigations almost invariably yield some useful discoveries. Perry found violations of the research protocol: Over time, the man playing the experimenter began to drift off script, urging reluctant “teachers” to keep going longer than they were supposed to. To my own dismay, I learned that Milgram committed what researchers, even then, would have considered a serious breach of ethics: He did not fully debrief subjects at the end of each experiment. “Teachers” got to meet the “learner” face-to-face after the experiment, so they could be assured that the “shocks” had not harmed him. But they were not told that all those escalating levels of shocks were completely fake because Milgram feared the word would get out and invalidate future participants’ behavior. It was almost a year before subjects were mailed a full explanation. Some never got it; some never understood the purpose of the whole experiment. That’s inexcusable. Such important revelations add complexity to the Milgram story, though again, not, I think, for introductory psychology students, who will use these details to dismiss the larger lesson.

For critics like Perry, these flaws are reason enough to kick Milgram off his pedestal and out of our textbooks. I disagree. I think we must continue giving his experiments the prominent position we do, and for the same reason we originally did. When I first read about Milgram’s experiments in grad school, I remember thinking, “Very clever, but what do they contribute? Wasn’t Nazi Germany evidence enough of obedience to authority?” But that was Milgram’s point: In the early 1960s, Americans — and American psychologists — deeply believed in national character. Germans obeyed Hitler, it was widely assumed, because obedience was in the German psyche: Look at all those high scores on the Authoritarian scale. People believed it could never happen here.

Elliot Aronson tells the following story in his memoir, Not by Chance Alone . When he was at Harvard University in 1960, his first year out of graduate school, he gave a guest lecture in Gordon Allport’s class. Allport, the grand old man of social psychology, introduced him as a “master of mendacity” because of the dramatic experiments on cognitive dissonance that were already bringing Elliot fame. Elliot was mildly insulted, naturally, and in talking with Allport afterward he defended the use of “deception” in high-impact experiments as “not lying, but theater.” Allport replied: “Why do you guys go through all that rigmarole? Why don’t you just ask the participants what they would do?” This, from Gordon Allport!

Elliot tried to explain that most people cannot predict or account for their own behavior with any degree of accuracy, but Allport was unpersuaded. A month or two later, Elliot went to Yale to give a colloquium and met Milgram for the first time. Milgram described the experiment he was planning and laid out its basic design. Elliot said, “Wow, I’ll bet a sizable number of people dole out more intense shocks than they themselves would ever have predicted.” Even he, however, never dreamed that two-thirds of them would go all the way.

For me, reading Perry’s criticisms made clear why the Milgram experiments deserve their prominence. “Deep down, something about Milgram makes us uneasy,” she writes. Indeed something does: his evidence that situations have power over our behavior. This is a difficult message, and most students — indeed, most people — have trouble accepting it. “I would never have pulled those levers!” they cry. “I would have told that experimenter what a … stinker … he is!” Perry insists that people’s personalities and histories influence their actions. But Milgram never disputed that fact; his own research revealed that many participants resisted. “There is a tendency to think that everything a person does is due to the feelings or ideas within the person,” Milgram wrote. “However, scientists know that actions depend equally on the situation in which a man finds himself.” Notice the “equally” in that sentence; many critics, like Perry, don’t.

One of the original subjects in the study, called Bill, tried to explain to Perry why the experiments were so valuable and why he did not regret participating. He hadn’t thought about the experiment for 20 years, he said, until he began dating a psychology professor. She, thrilled to have met a living link to the experiment, asked him to speak to her class. “Well,” Bill tells Perry, “you would have thought Adolf Hitler walked in the room. I never really thought about it that way, you know?” Bill told the students, who were silently sitting in judgment on him, “It’s very easy to sit back and say, ‘I’d never do this or that’ or ‘Nobody could ever get me to do anything like that.’ Well, guess what? Yes, they can.”

That, of course, is the moral of the story. But what interests me here is the wall of hostility Bill says he felt from the students. That means the students, like Gina Perry, weren’t getting it. They were reading about the experiment, seeing the films, and still not understanding that they themselves might have been Bill. As long as students regard the obedient participants as being the equivalent of Adolf Hitler, the Milgram experiments — which have yielded approximately the same findings whenever and wherever they have been replicated, whether in “softer” versions or cyberversions or TV versions — are as important as ever.

Perhaps one way to broaden acceptance of the Milgram message is to show how it generated research on the psychology of the minority who resisted. The obedience studies might shock or depress students who think they provide a “bleak view of human nature,” but these experiments of majority behavior also launched research into the conditions under which a brave minority becomes more likely to dissent, blow the whistle, disobey, and otherwise resist tyranny. That is, Milgram’s work spurred investigation into the fuller human story: the bleak and the inspiring, the conformist and the rebel.

Harlow’s Monkeys

I turn now to Harry Harlow’s classic experiments, conducted throughout the 1950s and 1960s, on the importance of contact comfort. Harlow took infant rhesus monkeys away from their mothers and raised them with a “wire mother,” a forbidding construction of wires with a milk bottle connected to it, and a “cloth mother,” a similar construction but one covered in foam rubber and terry cloth. At the time, it was widely believed (by psychologists, if not mothers) that babies become attached to their mothers simply because mothers provide food. But Harlow’s baby monkeys ran to the terry-cloth mother whenever they were frightened or startled, and clinging to it calmed them down. They went to the wire mother only for milk, and immediately abandoned it after they had finished feeding.

Harlow_PHOTO_CREDIT_UW-Madison Archives, #S01464_web

Although his experiments on primates are today considered cruel, Harry Harlow showed the importance of contact comfort at a time when many experts doubted the developmental significance of physical affection. Photo credit: UW-Madison Archives (#S01464)

Every introductory class and textbook tells this story, with heartbreaking photos of infant monkeys clinging to their wire and cloth mothers when a scary moving toy was put into their cage. Wasn’t this discovery something “we all knew” — in this case, that infants need contact comfort even more than they need food if they are to flourish? Didn’t we have enough data from psychoanalysts René Spitz and John Bowlby, who famously observed abandoned infants warehoused in orphanages?

Apparently not. As journalist Deborah Blum describes in her biography, Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection , most American psychologists at the time were under the influence of either behaviorism or psychoanalysis, two apparently opposite philosophies that nonetheless shared a key belief: that the origin of a baby’s attachment to the mother was through food. Behaviorists believed that healthy child development required positive reinforcement: Baby is hungry; hunger drive is satisfied; baby becomes conditioned to associate mother with food; mother and breast are equated. Interestingly, that was the Freudian view as well: No mother need be present, only a breast. “Love has its origin,” Freud wrote, “in attachment to the satisfied need for nourishment.” Why would cuddling be necessary? For the eminent behaviorist John Watson, cuddling was coddling.

But whereas Milgram’s findings need constant reiteration in every generation, Harlow’s research no longer surprises us. One might say that its very success has made teaching it unnecessary: No one would argue against Harlow’s findings, as many students always want to do with Milgram’s. Adult humans could choose to walk out of Milgram’s experiment at some point, and a third of them did. But the monkeys were captives, tortured by their isolation. In recent decades, psychologists have learned that the word “torture” is not an exaggeration to describe the experience of isolation for any primate. And to torture infants is horrible. But the fact that so many people think it is horrible now — and so many didn’t then — is an extraordinary story for teachers to tell. How has it happened that we have extended the moral circle to include other primates?

In 1973, as a young editor at Psychology Today , I interviewed Harlow. I walked through his lab with our photographer, Rod Kamitsuka, and looked aghast at a roomful of monkeys cowering in their individual cages, electrodes on their heads. When Rod took a picture of one, it became wildly excited and fearful, careening around its tiny cage trying to escape. Rod and I were horrified, but Harlow was amused by us. “I study monkeys,” Harlow said, “because they generalize better to people than rats do, and I have a basic fondness for people.” I asked him what he thought of his critics who said that taking infants from their mothers was cruel and that the results did not justify the cruelty. He replied: “I think I am a soft-hearted person, but I never developed a fondness for monkeys. Monkeys do not develop affection for people. And I find it impossible to love an animal that doesn’t love back.” Today, that sounds like lame moral reasoning: The fact that animals don’t love us is no justification for torturing them.

When I revisited Harlow’s work, however, I was reminded of how many pioneering discoveries he made, most of them lost in the telling of the main story of contact comfort. He also demonstrated that monkeys use tools, solve problems, and learn and explore because they are curious or interested in something beyond just food or other rewards. He demonstrated the importance of contact with peers, which can overcome even the detrimental effects of maternal deprivation. Harlow created a nuclear family unit for some of the monkeys and found that under those conditions, rhesus males became doting fathers — something they don’t do in the wild.

Harlow was hardly the first to demonstrate the power of “mother love,” the necessity of contact comfort, and the devastation that ensues when an infant is untouched, unloved, neglected. Was experimenting with monkeys, by raising them in isolation with only wire and cloth mothers and causing them anguish that no observer could fail to see, essential to make the same point that Bowlby and Spitz had made? I don’t know. What Harlow did, like Milgram, was to make his case dramatic, compelling, and scientifically incontrovertible. The evidence was based not on anecdote or observation, however persuasive, but on empirical, replicated data. As Blum shows, that’s what it took to begin to undermine a scientific worldview in which the need for touch and cuddling — physical expressions of mother love — had been so deeply ignored.

When I was first thinking about this topic, I was prepared to argue for jettisoning Harlow, given that his findings no longer surprise nor serve to persuade students to change a deeply held belief. Perhaps that judgment reflects my ineradicable memory of seeing those helpless, suffering baby monkeys. But in revisiting his work, I changed my mind. We should keep him; we should discuss his discoveries, while expanding our story of what they mean. Harlow’s work is a great chapter in the story of psychology: It shows not only how we thought about mothers, but also how we thought about monkeys. It shows how dominant psychological perspectives influence our lives — in his day, behaviorism or psychoanalysis; in our day, genetics and brain — and seep into the questions we ask and the studies we conduct. The take-home message for students is not “Look how much smarter, kinder, and more ethical we are today than those guys were,” but rather (1) Where would we be without these classics? What do they teach us about humanity that made them classics? (2) What is happening in today’s culture that affects the questions scientists are asking now — and the answers they get? Where might our own mistakes and biases lie — we, with all our institutional review boards and informed consents. Where are our failings of ethics and methods? The classics are living history, and we are not at the end of history by any means.

This article is based on talk that Carol Tavris delivered at the 26th Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science. A version of it appeared in the July 18 issue of the Times Literary Supplement .

References and Further Reading

Aronson, E. (2010). Not By Chance Alone: My Life as a Social Psychologist . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Blum, D. (2011). Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Perry, G. (2013). Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments . New York, NY: The New Press.

Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. W. (1988). The Robbers Cave experiment: Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation. [Orig. pub. as Intergroup Conflict and Group Relations] . Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Thank you, Carol Tavris, for this thoughtful analysis. I certainly agree with you that each of these iconic studies deserves a place in the teaching of psychology today, not only in the USA, but also in societies that were completely ignored in the design of those classics.

Students at African universities, for instance, can learn a lot from reflecting on how the socio-cultural context of the research questions addressed by Sherif, Milgram and Harlow relate to current issues in African societies, and by debating the balance of importance between the deeper moral issues investigated by Milgram and the procedural niceties of the “correction” introduced by contemporary IRB requirements.

Scientists are indeed held more explicitly accountable these days for the ethical standards by which they justify their research. But maybe we sometimes trivialise the focus of investigations by focusing attention on the rights of participants and the documentation of their informed consent.

One issue that often comes up when operationalising ethical guidelines in research in Africa is how to ensure that participants with limited exposure to formal education really understand their rights in the context of the study, or really understand the significance attributed by the researcher to the investigation. Ticking boxes on a protocol is a poor substitute for engaging participants, both before and after an experiment, in a collaborative search for understanding of the substantive topic to which the study is addressed, especially if the participant has limited literacy.

Robert Serpell, University of Zambia

Carol Tavris, thanks so much for your clear-eyed review of these classic studies that cannot be replicated, and now stand as indispensible yet “frozen-in-time” studies in our textbooks. Today’s IRBs were originally designed to review medical experiments after the Nuremberg Tribunals, and it is sad how they so mindlessly morphed to cover behavioral research. As you say, any classroom discussion about these classic studies must be accompanied by talk of proper ethics. In my class, I ask students this: “By today’s standards, did young Stanley Milgram in 1961 have an ethical obligation to stop (or continue) once he saw the surprising levels of stress in his participants?” Even in 2014, students answers vary greatly!

I enjoyed reading Carol Tavris’s analysis of Gina Perry’s book on Milgram. It is a complicated subject. One of the obstacles to an “objective” critique or appraisal here is the presence of biases, not only in Perry’s evaluations, but in Milgram’s own 1974 book as well. I regard the “truth” regarding Milgram’s experiments as, at least in principle, attainable, but seeking it is a daunting venture. All potentially relevant data, as well as commentaries on those data, must be put under the microscope. Carol Tavris has made an important contribution in this seemingly endless quest for understanding.

Permit me to follow-up on Harold Takooshian’s clear-headed addition to this most intelligent and provocative column by Carol Tavris. I’ll focus on the obedience study which, in my experience, is the one that grabs students’ attention almost without fail. I not only give center stage to the study and its repercussions in my social psychology course–Is there a social psychologist who doesn’t?–but treat it as the watershed lecture in teaching the power of the situation. My approach is to encourage students to get inside the head of a typical subject. I have them imagine seeing the original recruitment ad, making their way to the lab and I then continue to walk them through each and every step of the way to 450 volts and beyond. I want them to empathize with the subjects, to experience their missteps and torment as their own. I want them—excuse the psycho-babble–to be engaged. My question: Is my approach unethical? Should I be required to obtain informed consent? Isn’t my goal, in a sense, to serve as virtual subjects in the poster-child of ethically-questionable psychology experiments? Or, forgetting the excesses of Milgram’s design, how does it compare to Jerry Burger’s ethically-polished replication of the original? One thing I can say is that I’m ever-thankful to Milgram for the tool he’s given me to—again, excuse the psycho-babble—empower my students.

One reason for revisiting these studies is to understand their theoretical and historical contexts. Harlow, for example, was a colleague of Anna Freud who both experienced the mass movement of young children out of London during the bombings of 1939-1944. A debate erupted between Anna Freud’s colleagues and the followers of Melanie Klein over the bases of personality. Clearly, the issue of aggression as well as the issue of attachment is relevant for understanding human personality structure. The Milgram study emphasizes not merely the ethical requirements for social psychological experiments, but the human susceptibility to conformity to authority figures as well as the tendency to enjoy and accept that punishing others is acceptable. Consider the “disciplining” of children as socialization and also consider the quantity of S&M porn where pain is not only administered but accepted. Again, the structure of the human personality is very complicated but the roots of the adult personality can be found in how children are reared. The children do not ‘let go’ of their conditioned prejudices is all to obvious in everyday life as well as in social psychology experiments. Perhaps these early studies can tell students about personality structures without having to repeat them, but it seems clear that these studies point out to us dimensions of our personality that we might not be aware of; we could also have considered social psychological experiments with regard to gender and sexual behaviors which may be considered unethical today but which indicate important aspects of human personality structure.

Socio-cultural changes, since the studies were conducted, may affect the expectations in the individuals and influence the variance in both conformity and in/out group prejudice studies. What could had been attitude affecting in/out group prejudice then, now could be identity preservation. With more contact and information about the similarities to an outgroup, may threaten ones ingroup identity. To preserve the ingroup identity, hostility towards the outgroup would then create the distance. The difference between then and now could be attitude versus identity, respectively.

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About the Author

Carol A. Tavris is an APS Fellow, social psychologist, writer, and lecturer. She and Carole Wade have written several leading psychology textbooks. Her trade books include Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (with APS William James Fellow Elliot Aronson), The Mismeasure of Woman, and Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion. She can be reached at [email protected] .

Careers Up Close: Joel Anderson on Gender and Sexual Prejudices, the Freedoms of Academic Research, and the Importance of Collaboration

Joel Anderson, a senior research fellow at both Australian Catholic University and La Trobe University, researches group processes, with a specific interest on prejudice, stigma, and stereotypes.

Experimental Methods Are Not Neutral Tools

Ana Sofia Morais and Ralph Hertwig explain how experimental psychologists have painted too negative a picture of human rationality, and how their pessimism is rooted in a seemingly mundane detail: methodological choices.

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In addition, an APS Rising Star receives the society’s Early Investigator Award.

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Harlow's Monkey

An unapologetic look at transracial and transnational adoption, why “harlow’s monkey”.

In the 1950’s, psychologist Harry Harlow began a series of experiments on baby monkeys, depriving them of their biological mothers and using substitute wire and terry cloth covered “mothers”. Harlow’s goal was to study the nature of attachment and how it affects monkeys who were deprived of their mothers early in life.

As an unwitting participant in the human form of Harlow’s monkey experiment, known as trans-racial or trans-cultural adoption, I am constantly seeking to expand my knowledge and understanding of the life-long ramifications of these types of social experiments.

According to the State Department, in 2005, over 21,500 children immigrated to the United States for the purpose of adoption, the majority of these children left their native homeland, language, customs, foods and religions for a middle-class, white, American home. The majority of these children also come from a country in which they were part of the racial hegemeny, only to now be part of a racial minority.

This blog was born in March of 2006 as a way to put down my thoughts about international and transracial adoption from a point of view that is often missing – the adoptee themselves. As a social worker in the field of adoptions, and having spent a lot of time volunteering or working with adoptees, and having the benefit of a social work education, I wanted to connect-the-gaps in what I saw as an adoptive parent and adoption professional dominant discourse around adoption.

Part 2: Why I named the blog Harlow’s Monkey

Since this is hot-button item, I thought it was time to discuss the subject of Harlow and his monkey experiments in a little more depth, and the reason why I chose this name for my blog. Keep in mind that I am not an expert on Harlow or his science; I just found that there are a lot of parallels between Harlow’s experiments and adoption and Harlow was attempting to learn about the nature of attachment and what happens when infant monkeys are removed from their mothers.

I am far from being creative or unique in choosing to name my blog, Harlow’s Monkey . Many others before me have made the connection to adoption. Harlow himself compared the baby monkeys in his experiments to human children and aimed to study how maternal deprivation and love and attachment influenced human beings.

Harlow’s famous monkey experiment hinged on the question of whether infant monkeys removed from their mothers would respond to substitute wire monkey “mothers” that provided food (physical needs) over terry-cloth covered wire “mothers” without food (comfort). Harlow’s results found that these infant monkeys would cling to and respond to the soft, fabric covered monkeys over the plain wire “mothers” with food, thus showing that nurturing and the need for affection were greater than the need for food.

Harlow studied this concept in a second phase of his experiment. He separated the baby monkeys into two groups; one with the terry cloth mother, one with the wire mother. Both groups of monkeys ate the same amount but the behaviors of the wire monkey babies were markedly different than the cloth monkey babies. Especially important to note is that those monkeys who had the cloth-covered “mothers” were able to calm themselves better when frightened with stimuli; they also hadquicker resolutions after being frightened to base-level behavior. The wire-covered monkey babies, however, had great difficulty when frightened. They did not go to their mother; instead, they would screech, rock back and forth or throw themselves on the floor.

Harlow’s experiments showed us that attachment and bonding is more important to the infant monkey than just providing for physical needs. That is, we want to develop in our children the next few steps on the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; what I’ve called socialization (family, friends, community – in other words, a sense of belonging); self esteem and self-actualization.

According to Harlow’s own words ( Love in Infant Monkeys, Scientific American 200, June 1959 ):

Thus all the objective tests we have been able to devise agree in showing that the infant monkey’s relationship to its surrogate mother is a full one. Comparison with the behavior of infant monkeys raised by their real mothers confirms this view. Like our experimental monkeys, these infants spend many hours a day clinging to their mothers, and run to them for comfort or reassurance when they are frightened. The deep and abiding bond between mother and child appears to be essentially thesame, whether the mother is real or a cloth surrogate. . . . The depth and persistence of attachment to the mother depend not only on the kind of stimuli that the young animal receives but also on when it receives them. . . . Clinical experience with human beings indicates that people who have been deprived of affection in infancy may have difficulty forming affectional ties in later life. From preliminary experiments with our monkeys we have also found that their affectional responses develop, or fail to develop, according to a similar pattern.

In naming my blog Harlow’s Monkey , I was not aiming to “diss” my parents. Harlow’s Monkey was named to illustrate the broader issues that I see in adoption. Whether it’s “harsh” or not, the truth is that for those of us who were adopted, we are being raised by “substitute” parents. Just as we children are often substitute children for our parents, especially those of us who were adopted as a result of our parents’ infertility.

But as Harlow’s experiments clearly show, it is the quality of the comfort and the ability to meet our emotional needs that is important and not just the ability to feed, clothe and shelter us. Which is an important consideration when thinking about things such as home studies. Home studies and foster care licenses were once based more on the ability of the parents to provide the shelter and safety requirements for a child. We now know that it takes much more; the ability of the parent to provide emotional comfort and care.

This is especially important to me because when we think about transracial adoption and international adoption, we social workers look at the home study and see that yes, this parent or these parents can meet the physical and safety needs of a child; and they seem warm and caring too. But without an ability to provide for our emotional and psychological comfort around our racial and cultural needs , we are left alone like Harlow’s rhesus monkeys and their wire-only mothers.

Do I think that I am part of a large, social experiment? You bet. Just like Harlow’s rhesus monkeys, we transracially and internationally adopted persons have been poked and prodded and been the focus of many evaluations and studies in order to see whether it “works” – that is, are we psychologically all right after being removed from our families and communities of color into mostly white, middle- to upper-class families? How are we transracial and international adoptees faring, considering that the current federal legislation in the United States prohibits considering the cultural and racial needs of a child?

Harry Harlow didn’t walk into his lab, conduct his experiments on one baby monkey, then call it a day. He repeated his experiments, like good scientists do, in order to achieve some amount of reliability and validity in his results.

On a micro level, I am just my parents’ daughter, sister to my siblings, auntie to my nieces and nephew, grandchild and cousin.

But I am also part of a macro system of children who were born under circumstances that led to my being placed in a substitute home. Over 200,000 of us from Korea alone.

When people focus on individual cases, one (or two) parent(s) and one child, it’s easy to forget the larger societal patterns that happen as a result. We are talking about diasporas and migrations. We are talking about displacement and traumas. I am not “dissing” my parents, because they did what they were advised to do by their social workers and adoption agency. They raised me as as if I was a white child born to them, just like my siblings.

It is the larger, societal issues, such as the philosophy of the times that advised social workers 20 years ago to raise their children like “white, biological children” that trouble me. Harlow’s Monkey is my way of lifting the micro-level veil over our eyes and examining the macro- and global issues around the practice of adoption.

For more on Harry Harlow, check out The Adoption History Project – Harry Harlow

For more on Harry Harlow and his monkey experiments, see: The Nature of Love and Wikipedia’s entry on Harry Harlow .

No More Wire Mothers, Ever

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By Barbara Smuts

Feb. 2, 2003

LOVE AT GOON PARK

Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection.

By Deborah Blum.

Illustrated. 336 pp. Cambridge, Mass.:

Perseus Publishing. $26.

While studying wild baboons in Kenya, I once stumbled upon an infant baboon huddled in the corner of a cage at the local research station. A colleague had rescued him after his mother was strangled by a poacher's snare. Although he was kept in a warm, dry spot and fed milk from an eyedropper, within a few hours his eyes had glazed over; he was cold to the touch and seemed barely alive. We concluded he was beyond help. Reluctant to let him die alone, I took his tiny body to bed with me. A few hours later I was awakened by a bright-eyed infant bouncing on my stomach. My colleague pronounced a miracle. ''No,'' Harry Harlow would have said, ''he just needed a little contact comfort.''

The phrase ''contact comfort'' was made famous through Harlow's experiments with baby rhesus monkeys at the University of Wisconsin in the 1950's and 60's. In her well-researched account of Harlow's life and work, ''Love at Goon Park,'' Deborah Blum describes how Harlow removed newborn infants from their mothers and housed them with surrogate mothers, some made of terry cloth and some of wire. When exposed to a moving toy or a strange room, babies with cloth mothers rushed to them, buried their faces in the soft fabric and relaxed. Their peers, with only wire mothers, shook in terror against the wall. Left alone for months with only wire mothers, they pined away, staring at the world with lifeless eyes, like my orphaned baboon.

The series of Harlow's experiments that followed revolutionized psychology in the middle of the 20th century. Until then, as Blum vividly documents, the dominant thinking in psychology was very different. An extreme position, made popular by psychologists like John Watson, held that young children should never be caressed, held or physically comforted by parents. Watson and later behaviorists like B. F. Skinner claimed that a baby reaching for Mom is simply reflecting an association between Mom and food. Early psychologists said that mothers who responded warmly to a baby's cries would produce excessively dependent adults, unable to function in American society. Despite the absence of supporting evidence, this view profoundly influenced not only parental behavior but national institutions like orphanages, which minimized contact between caregivers and children, and hospitals, which denied parents the opportunity to comfort their sick and frightened children.

When Harlow began his monkey experiments, a few sensitive researchers, like the British psychiatrist John Bowlby, had challenged behaviorist dogma. But because they based their claims mainly on anecdotal evidence, mainstream psychology, aspiring to be a ''hard science'' like physics, rejected them. Harlow's genius, Blum says, was to recognize the importance of using a humanlike animal to document thoroughly the positive effects of love and the devastation wrought by its absence.

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Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love by Jim Ottaviani & Dylan Meconis

Author: Jim Ottaviani & Dylan Macon's

Format: Paperback

Publish Date: July 2007

Publisher: G.T. Labs

Catalog ID: 9780978803711

Where to buy: https://bookshop.org/shop/graphicmedicine

Author website: unknown

Book Review by Kevin Wolf

Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love covers the research of Harry Harlow, an experimental psychologist at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (UWM), from the winter of 1959 back in time to 1950 with Harry as the narrator. Harry’s experiments found that love and comfort was necessary to survive and thrive. For being a relatively short graphic work (84 pages), Wire Mothers does a great job presenting a powerful message and a fairly thorough biography of Harry Harlow. Well done black, white and grey portrayal with a clear narrative. I recommend this graphic biography.

Harry’s research was centered at the street address: 600 N Park. I’m using his first name in this review, because he was so personable and prided himself on writing articles and doing presentations free of jargon. His lab was given the nickname Goon Park for the “6” loosely written appearing to be a “G” with “00 N” of the address completing the word Goon and the experiments on rhesus monkeys which were done there. Harry studied humans indirectly through experimentation on other mammals. Those mammals included cats and rats early on, but the bulk of his experiments were with rhesus monkeys.

Wire Mothers follows Harry from his early ideas through his most significant experiments at UWM. Early on the graphic biography shows a brand new janitor starting to clean the lab finding cigarette butts (Harry chain smoked) on the floor, mumbling prophetically “Think their mothers’d teach ‘em …” to not be so messy, and called it a “zoo” before he encounters Harry sleeping at his desk. It’s 3:00 am, which is typical of Harlow being there so late. The janitor is new and is there for Harry to give him (and the reader) his history and to whom Harry can explain the Goon Park experiments. Harry goes back to his days as a young faculty member in 1950 when he was mistaken as a freshman undergrad, had a speech impediment (“diwect” which he corrects to “direct”), and had changed his name (from Harry Israel) to avoid anti-Semitism.

Harry didn’t like the experimental standard of using rats in only one experiment and then euthanizing them. He initially shared a building with the Dean of Men who didn’t appreciate the smell of the rats.

Harry spoke and wrote in a straightforward way, free of jargon and nonsense. Harry said, in Wire Mothers , “Most of the experimenters never realized these experiments [on rats] were useless, although it must have occurred to some of the rats.” Harlow likes puns, but his audience often didn’t. He uses humorous poetry (which he called “catteral,” being doggerel that didn’t do the trick). The poem for this scenario from the rats’ perspective is:

There is a man behind the glass;

I think he is a stupid ass.

I’ve trained him when I press the bar

To give me food six times an hour

Here’s some confusing background that’s mostly presented at the end of Wire Mothers with non-Harry, universal narration … because it’s confusing. Harry married his first wife, Clara Mears, in 1932 and they divorced in 1946. He married Margaret (“Peggy”) Kuenne that same year. Peggy died in 1971 from cancer, which led to Harry’s clinical depression. He remarried Clara in 1972 and they remained together until his death in 1981. Harry co-wrote with Clara, Peggy and other contributors many articles, including a collection of articles he had previously published, in The Human Model: Primate Perspectives (V.H. Winston & Sons © 1979).

In 1950 Harry, wanting to get away from rats, took Peggy’s suggestion to go to the local Madison zoo to study animal behavior. He studied how primates “learn to learn.” That is, that past gained knowledge helps in future learning. Harry decided primates were more appropriate for him to study. When the Dean wanted his experiments removed, Harry helped build his own lab, which became “Goon Park,” on UWM grounds [now called the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center (WNPRC) at 1220 Capital Court in Madison] where his work with rhesus monkeys occurred.

Scientific wisdom during this time was that one could isolate babies to prevent “germs” from infecting them, teach them appropriate behavior without much physical contact, and otherwise treat them like small adults for them to be well-adjusted and happy. Harry abhorred this wisdom, which mainly came from John B. Watson’s (1878-1958; page 36 of Wire Mothers mistakenly calls him James not John) and B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) who had long argued that only the physical needs of children needed attention. Their emotional needs were irrelevant. Harry found the opposite to be true, that the isolation was detrimental. Not mentioned in Wire Mothers were Watson’s controversial “Little Albert” experiments. The “Little Albert” experiment was to condition fear of a white rat in a child, who initially enjoyed and played with the rat, by hitting a large bell whenever Albert played with the rat. Albert went on to cry at the sight of a white rabbit, white dog and white fur coat.

Wire mothers likely, appropriately took artistic license with juxtaposing Harry’s frustration with psychological wisdom of the day by placing him at an alleged Watson lecture. [I’m not able to confirm if Harry attended such a lecture; Watson died in 1958 and had left psychology for advertising in 1936]. In Wire Mothers over several pages and many panels Harry said, “Not a single use of the word [love] anywhere. The CLOSEST we get in the [psychological] science literature is AFFECTION. And even THAT’S barely used. Everybody talks about ‘proximity’ instead. ‘Proximity.’ Can you believe it? Well I sure can’t.” And has John Watson, President of the American Psychological Association (APA, he had been president in 1915), say in the lecture, “Certainly kissing the child on the back of the hand, or patting it on the head once in a while … these would be all the petting needed for a baby to learn that it’s growing up in a kindly home. Trust them as though they were … young adults. Let your behavior always be objective, and kindly firm. Never let them sit in your lap. If absolutely necessary, kiss them once on the forehead when you say your goodnight. The end is a happy child.” In Wire Mothers , Watson’s lecture audience, except for Harry, was bespectacled and eyeless, symbolic of mindless believers. After the lecture Harry is shown confronting Watson by asking if Watson’s mother & Freud’s & Skinner’s had been doing it all wrong after which Watson was speechless.

Wire Mothers covers Skinner raising his daughter (Deborah) in his creation, the baby tender , a filtered and humidified box, partly sound proof, with the child seeing and being seen through glass. According to psychologicalscience.org ( psychologicalscience.org/observer/skinner-air-crib#.WDMfPIZOKEc ), the baby tender was to reduce the effect of the harsh Minnesota winters on the child and had no detrimental effects on Skinner’s daughter; this was her crib for her first 2½ years; and only a few hundred of these cribs were ever sold. This was not a Skinner Box, which was used to experiment on small animals. Wire Mothers shows Deborah upset and crying with Skinner narrating, “[Deborah] greets us with a smile when we look at her through the glass! This could be very useful in hospitals—it could save overworked nurses TIME! It can save MOTHERS labor as well!!” Harry became president of the APA in 1958-59. As a counterweight to Skinner and Watson’s behaviorism, Wire Mothers mentions Harry delivering his APA presidential speech, The Nature of Love .

In preparation for a TV interview with CBS—about two-thirds of the way through Wire Mothers —Harry shows some of the rhesus experiments on love; and the reader sees where “wire mothers” (a portion of both types is shown on the book cover) come from. Harry created surrogate rhesus mothers with chicken wire either covered in soft carpeting or left as wire. Both have faces and could have milk bottles strategically placed. Infant monkeys could imprint on either of them as their “mother” depending on the experiment. Harry found the mothers who had soft coverings, where the infant monkey could cling and cuddle, led to better adjusted monkeys. The infants avoided the wire mothers and became attached to the cloth mothers; even if only the wire mother provided a milk bottle. Harry says, “Given the chance #106 [a specific infant] will spend 17-18 hours a day on the cloth mother and less than 1 hour on the wire mother [for bottle feeding].” And if they were nursed on the cloth mother, they ignored the wire mother—“except to explore.” Frightening the infant will send it to its cloth mother whose touch gives the infant confidence to challenge what frightened it. The presence of the cloth mother gives security and confidence to an infant in a brand new environment; and without the cloth mother or even with a wire mother, the infant lies in the fetal position, unmoving. An infant reared with no mother, will remain frightened, insecure and motherless even if a cloth mother is later put in its sight; it rocks back and forth and shows no affection at all. Wire Mothers shows perfectly the insecure/confident rhesus infants as they interact with their environment supervised by wire/cloth mothers, respectively, both visually and narratively.

Wire Mothers mentions, but doesn’t show, Harry’s experiments related to the “Pit of Dispair.” Finally, Wire Mothers doesn’t discuss the animal rights groups which protested Harry’s experiments, especially the ones meant to psychologically damage the monkeys. Though not a graphic work, if you want more on the life of Harry Harlow, I recommend Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum, Perseus publisher, © 2002, which was used by Ottaviani and Meconis as a resource.

[…] Review: Wire Mothers: Harry Harlow and the Science of Love by Jim Ottaviani & Dylan Meconis via […]

wire and cloth mother experiment

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Harry Harlow Theory & Rhesus Monkey Experiments in Psychology

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Conclusions

The Impact of Harlow’s Research

Ethics of Harlow’s Study

Harry Harlow and the Nature of Affection

Impact of Harry Harlow’s Research

Early Research On Love

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A Word From Verywell

Classics in the History of Psychology

The Nature of Love

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What Are Harlow’s Monkey Experiments?

Psychology Before Harlow's Monkey Experiments

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Attachment Theory and Harlow's Monkey Experiments

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Chapter 1 . MOTHER LOVE: THE WORK OF HARRY HARLOW

MOTHER LOVE:

What Is an Infant’s Love for Its Mother?

Question 1.1

An Introduction to Harlow’s Work

Introduction to Harlow’s Work: Historical Context

Question 1.2

The Experiment

The Results

Is This Love?

A Secure Base

Rethink an Earlier Response

Assessment: Check Your Understanding

Three Lessons From Wire Mother

Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments: Monkeying Around With Love

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Harlow’s Rhesus Monkey Experiments

The Experiment

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