Describe Harry Harlow's experiment with rhesus monkeys. What do you think these researchers might have hypothesized about mother-infant bonding prior to conducting their research? What were the methods and results of this research?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

For many years, psychology theorists thought babies bonded to their parents because parents provided food, which babies naturally enjoyed. Over time, babies would start to associate their parents with the provision of food and would then become attached to them. A series of pioneering experiments with monkeys by Harry Harlow and his colleagues established that more than feeding is involved in the mother-infant bond. In these experiments, rhesus monkeys were separated from their mothers and raised in a laboratory. The infant monkeys were put into cages with two kinds of surrogate "mothers": a plain cylindrical wire-mesh form with an attached bottle for nursing or a form covered with terry cloth that provided no food. The essential question was "to which mother would the baby monkeys become attached?" If earlier theorists were right, the babies should have become attached to the wire "mother" because she provided food. However, the monkeys actually became attached to the soft terry cloth "mother." When the monkeys were allowed to spend time with either kind of "mother," they all spent more time-indeed the majority of their time-clinging to and cuddling with the cloth surrogates.

It is hardly surprising that a dummy mother would not provide the same kinds of stimulation and opportunities for positive development as a live mother. These studies show that feeding is not the most important thing babies get from their mothers. Mothering includes the comfort of close bodily contact and, at least in monkeys, the satisfaction of an innate need to cling.