Beat the monkey and his plush recreate a famous psychological experiment

Beat the monkey and his plush recreate a famous psychological experiment

By Mark Nielsen & The Conversation US

The following essay is reproduced with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.

A baby macaque monkey named Punch has gone viral for his heartbreaking quest for friendship.

After being abandoned by his mother and rejected by the rest of his troop, his zookeepers at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan rewarded Punch with an orangutan plushie as a stand-in mother. Videos of the monkey clinging to the toy have gone viral worldwide.

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But Punch’s attachment to his lifeless companion isn’t just the subject of a heartbreaking video. It also goes back to the story of a famous set of psychological experiments conducted in the 1950s by the American researcher Harry Harlow.

The findings from his experiments underpin many of the central tenets of attachment theory, which positions the bond between parents and children as crucial to children’s development.

What were Harlow’s experiments?

Harlow took rhesus monkeys from birth, removing them from their mothers. These monkeys were raised in an enclosure where they had access to two surrogate “mothers”. One was a wire cage shaped like a “mother” monkey, which could provide food and drink via a small feeder. The other was a monkey-shaped doll wrapped in a terry towel. This doll was soft and comfortable, but it gave neither food nor drink; it was little more than a furry figure the baby monkey could cling to.

So we have one option that provides comfort but no food or drink, and one that is cold, hard and dry but provides sustenance. These experiments were a response to behaviourism, which was the prevailing theoretical view at the time. Behaviorists proposed that babies bond with those who provide them with their biological needs, such as food and shelter.

Harlow challenged this theory by suggesting that babies need care, love and kindness to form attachments, rather than just physical sustenance. A behaviorist would have expected the monkeys to spend all their time with the “mother” who fed them. That’s not actually what happened. The monkeys spent significantly more time each day clinging to the terry cloth “mother”.

Harlow’s experiments in the 1950s established the importance of softness, care and kindness as a basis for attachment. Given the opportunity, Harlow showed, babies prefer emotional sustenance over physical sustenance.

How did this affect modern attachment theory?

Harlow’s discovery was significant because it completely reoriented the dominant behaviorist view of the time. This dominant view suggested that primates, including humans, function in reward and punishment cycles, forming attachments to whoever fulfills physical needs such as hunger and thirst. Emotional sustenance was not part of the behaviourist paradigm. So when Harlow did his experiments, he turned the prevailing theory on its head.

The apes’ preference for emotional sustenance, in the form of cuddling the furry terry toweled surrogate “mother”, formed the basis for the development of attachment theory. Attachment theory suggests that healthy child development occurs when a child is “securely attached” to the caregiver. This is achieved by the parent or carer providing emotional nourishment, care, kindness and attention to the child. Insecure attachment occurs when the parent or caregiver is cold, distant, abusive, or neglectful.

Just like the rhesus monkeys, you can feed a human baby everything they need, give them all the dietary nutrition they need, but if you don’t give them warmth and love, they won’t bond with you.

What can we learn from Punch?

The zoo didn’t conduct an experiment, but Punch’s situation inadvertently mirrors the controlled experiment Harlow did. So the experimental setup was mimicked in a more natural setting, but the results look very similar. Just as Harlow’s monkeys favored their mother with a terry towel, Punch has bonded with his IKEA plush companion.

Now, what we don’t have with the zoo situation is the comparison to a tough, physically nourishing alternative. But that was clearly not what the monkey was looking for. He wanted a comforting and soft safe place, and that’s what the doll provided.

Were Harlow’s experiments ethical?

Most of the world now recognizes that primates have rights that in some cases correspond to human rights. Today we would see Harlow’s experiments as a cruel and unkind thing to do. You wouldn’t take a human child from its mother and do this experiment, so we shouldn’t do this to primates.

It is interesting to see people so fascinated by this parallel to an experiment conducted more than 70 years ago. Punch the monkey isn’t just the internet’s newest animal celebrity – he’s a reminder of the importance of emotional nourishment.

We all need soft spaces. We all need safe spaces. Love and warmth are far more important to our well-being and function than physical nourishment alone.

This article was originally published on The conversation. Read original article.

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