Harry Harlow

Harry Harlow (1905-1981) questioned theories of the 1950s, which stated that love began as this feeding bond between mother and baby. Harlow thought the baby might desire contact more than a need for food. In his early work (1958), he noticed that baby monkeys whom he had separated from their mothers became very attached to cloth diapers that lined their cages. This strong attachment to cloth made Harlow think that a baby monkey needs something soft to cling to. He was reminded of a baby's attachment to a soft blanket. To test his idea, Harlow and his colleagues carried out a series of studies with newborn rhesus monkeys that they separated from their mothers. Rhesus monkeys are more mature at birth than humans, but like human infants they show a range of emotions and need to be nursed. They housed the baby monkeys with surrogate mothers constructed of wire and wood. One was just a wire frame with a crude head. The other was a wire frame covered with soft terry cloth. Both mothers were heated and either could be hooked up to a bottle of milk. 

In the first study, Harlow removed eight monkeys from their mothers shortly after birth. Cloth and wire mothers were housed in cubicles attached to the infants' cages. Half the monkeys were randomly assigned to get milk from the wire monkey; the other half got their milk from the cloth monkey.

Harlow used the amount of time spent with a surrogate mother as a measure of the affection bond. He found that contact comfort was much more important than the source of food in determining which surrogate mother the monkeys preferred. The babies stayed with the wire mother only long enough to get the necessary food. Regardless of whether a baby monkey nursed from the cloth mother or the wire mother, it spent most of its time with the cloth mom, especially if they were scared. When the cloth mother had the bottle, the baby monkeys did not go to the wire mother at all.

Harlow's findings suggested that the view that babies preferred being with their mothers because the mothers provided food was at least partially incorrect. Harlow went so far as to say that a primary function of nursing in humans was contact as much as nutrition.

Click here for a video clip of Harlow's experiment.

 


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