Harry Harlow and his monkeys: being cruel in order to be kind?
While researching my recent series on questioning authority, I got the idea to write a post about the seminal Milgram experiments on obedience to authority.
When I was a psych major back in college, part of our learning experience involved—as you might expect—studying psychology experiments. Many were of the so-called “rat psych” variety, and some were of a more clinical nature. Then much later, while getting my clinical Master’s in the early 90s, I had to read many more. In between, I actually worked as a social science researcher in a place with a sterling reputation. So I’ve done my time—and more—in the field of psychological research, including being a subject back in college (I remember interminable sessions with what was known as a “memory drum.” Bloody boring.).
But I must admit (or is it confess?) that too much social science research is “garbage in, garbage out.” Not all of course, but quite a bit. Some of this is the fault of sloppy methodology. But most of the problem may be inherent in the nature of the beast of social science research itself: too many variables to control for, too many unknowns.
But even social science has some experiments so very wonderfully done, and with such fascinating results, that they not only impressed me when I first encountered them, but they stayed with me and inform me still.
One was the famous “learned helplessness” research, in which dogs who received painful electric shocks without the possibility of escape learned that their efforts to avoid the pain were futile. Later, when they received shocks in a situation in which they were able to escape, they didn’t even try. Another was the perhaps even more famous case of the Harlow monkeys. Still another, of course, was Milgram’s research on obedience to authority.
The first two involved cruelty to animals in those pre-PETA days. The third involved feigned physical cruelty (and, some would argue, actual psychological cruelty) to humans. I’m no PETA member, but I’ve seen the visuals on Harlow’s monkeys and the shocked dogs–both the films and the still photos–and they are disturbing to watch.
Harlow’s research wasn’t limited to the esoteric halls of academe; his surrogate-mother monkeys became well-known through a feature in Life magazine in the 50s, where I first encountered them as a young child.
There was something haunting about those photos. I could hardly take my eyes away from the mournful expressions of the baby monkeys Harlow had taken away from their mothers and raised with two “surrogate mothers”–a wire one with a bottle attached, where the baby could get its nourishment, and a cloth one the baby could cling to for comfort (see photo that begins this essay).
And cling they did:
Before Harlow, many psychologists thought that the mother/infant bond was based on the nourishment provided. Harlow theorized that touch and comfort were even more crucial–if not in keeping the infant alive, then in keeping it emotionally healthy. This may seem self-evident today, but at the time it was revolutionary.
Harlow’s experiments exemplify the paradoxical nature of research that subjects animals to some sort of cruelty and yet yields results that can benefit humans.
Here’s a description of what actually happened to Harlow’s monkeys:
When the experimental subjects were frightened by strange, loud objects, such as teddy bears beating drums, monkeys raised by terry cloth surrogates made bodily contact with their mothers, rubbed against them, and eventually calmed down. Harlow theorized that they used their mothers as a “psychological base of operations,” allowing them to remain playful and inquisitive after the initial fright had subsided. In contrast, monkeys raised by wire mesh surrogates did not retreat to their mothers when scared. Instead, they threw themselves on the floor, clutched themselves, rocked back and forth, and screamed in terror…
In subsequent experiments, Harlow’s monkeys proved that “better late than never” was not a slogan applicable to attachment. When Harlow placed his subjects in total isolation for the first eights months of life, denying them contact with other infants or with either type of surrogate mother, they were permanently damaged. Harlow and his colleagues repeated these experiments, subjecting infant monkeys to varied periods of motherlessness. They concluded that the impact of early maternal deprivation could be reversed in monkeys only if it had lasted less than 90 days, and estimated that the equivalent for humans was six months. After these critical periods, no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the monkeys’ abnormal behaviors and make up for the emotional damage that had already occurred. When emotional bonds were first established was the key to whether they could be established at all.
But the story is actually worse than that. It turns out that even the contact comfort of a cloth surrogate mother was not enough to raise a healthy monkey. All of Harlow’s monkeys had severe disruptions when they grew up–for example, they could not mate.
You might ask: what’s the point? Isn’t this stuff obvious? Who needed an experiment to prove it? But that’s 20/20 hindsight; at the time, Harlow’s results sent shockwaves through the psychology community:
What may seem obvious to us now…was as counter to the conventional wisdom in psychology in those days as Galileo’s ideas were to the astronomy in his day…The field was dominated by the behaviorist theories of psychologists like B. F. Skinner and child development theories exemplified by John Watson, who used his presidency of the American Psychological Association to conduct a personal crusade against cuddling children.
Harlow’s carefully executed and presented research sent shockwaves through the psychology community, eventually discrediting behaviorism and many other -isms under the extraordinary force of the information he collected. His voluminous hard data replaced what previously had been anecdotal evidence in fledgling schools of thought, providing a much-needed scientific basis for theories like attachment theory, humanistic psychology (Abraham Maslow was his first graduate student), and patient-centered therapy.
And what of Harlow himself? According to this Boston Globe profile, he was a troubled and contentious man. His life included two broken marriages, alcoholism, and depression (did he, perhaps, have only a cloth mother, too?)
Harlow didn’t even like monkeys—or animals—at all, which undoubtedly made it easier for him to conduct his research:
Harlow felt no kinship with his test subjects. “The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish,” he said. “I don’t have any love for them. I never have. I don’t really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you love monkeys?”
Harlow fired off some excellent bon mots, including this one:
[Harlow] was at a conference one day, and every time he used the word “love” another scientist would interrupt and say, “You must mean proximity, don’t you?” until at last Harlow, a brash man who could also be strangely shy, said, “It may be that proximity is all you know of love—I thank God I have not been so deprived.”
But one wonders. If the original experiments were dark, later ones (after his divorces and electroshock treatments for depression) grew far darker, and entered the realm of sadism. I’m not using this word lightly; see whether you agree with me:
[Harlow] built a black isolation chamber in which an animal was hung upside down for up to two years, unable to move or see the world, fed through a grid at the bottom of the V-shaped device. This Harlow called “the well of despair.” Indeed, it was successful in creating a primate model of mental illness. The animals, once removed, after months or years, were shattered and psychotic. Nothing Harlow did could bring them back. There appeared to be no cure. No way to contact, to comfort.
Harlow’s earlier research was somewhat cruel, but it had a clear purpose and results that could be used to the benefit of humans. This later research (performed during the 60s) almost undoubtedly would not have been allowed today, whatever his previous reputation. It amounted to the torture of highly intelligent and sensitive animals, to no real purpose.
To me, it’s a case of balance. Harlow’s early experiments had elements of cruelty, but even before the experiments were performed it was clear that they could have some beneficial results for child-rearing (which have ultimately come to include advances in the treatment of premature and institutionalized infants, and the resurgence of breastfeeding). Furthermore, with those early experiments, the extent of the resultant disturbances to the monkeys’ psyches was unforeseen and unexpected.
Harlow’s latter experiments, however, seemed to have no redeeming social importance. The horrific results on the monkeys’ psyches seem not only predictable, but inevitable, and it’s virtually impossible to see how even the feisty Harlow could have argued, prospectively, of any real benefit to our knowledge of human nature likely to result from them.
In certain cases it may indeed be necessary to be cruel to animals in order to be kinder to humans. But Harlow’s trajectory is a cautionary tale of the necessity to calibrate the two.
We may mock PETA for its excesses—I certainly do. But there are times—especially in the relatively unfettered past—that research on animals can go too far. The trick is to make a considered and reasonable judgment about when that may be so, balancing the possible good with the probable harm likely to result. In that equation, people count more than animals, but animals still count for something.
” But there are times–especially in the relatively unfettered past–that research on animals can go too far.”
I’m going to love the day — sure to come — when it is revealed that by failing “to go too far” some researcher somewhere missed the cure for pancreatic cancer.
Vanderleun-
Say, by failing to create a half-human hybrid they can tear appart? There is always a bridge too far that, if crossed, would give great rewards–but with a cost far too high.
Isn’t the usual equation for anythat is has to have a goal, method, and the desired result must be worth the time and trouble?
I think Harry Harlow was studying himself. I was at two universites where I heard him lecture and heard of him through his colleagues. I don’t think I’d have wanted to meet “the real thing.” The consensus seems to be that he was a monster.
What was being done to monkeys was a more aggressive version of what was being done to human beings. Have a look at Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (Hardcover)by Alston Chase, which deals with the experiments performed by Henry A. Murray, one of the top names in academic psychology around mid-century.
they have animal/human hybrids…
old hat…
sorry hit enter too fast.
look up chimerics and transgenetic
A new human-mouse hybrid is the first mammalian model that can develop the human AIDS virus. The scientists in Texas who developed the “humanized” animal are paving the way to a new generation of AIDS research that could significantly accelerate the quest for an AIDS vaccine and other therapies, scientists say.
we have been doing things like this for years.
oh and we do xenographic transplants too.
and some are working on tuning pig stem cells to work as repair means for human heart stuff.
most of the stuff that they crow about has ulterior motives.
the stem cell fight is about abortion, not stem cells. the left wants fetal stem cell so that abortion is locked down by haveing a medical need to exist.
but the invisablehand worked around this and we dont need fetal cells.
that stopped them yelling at bush claiming he is killing science.
but its gotten obama to now claim that fetal stem cells are better.
they basically learned what i put in my other post. that the genome is played in a cell… so if you can get the cell environment to be right, you get stem cells.. thats WAY oversimplefied, but i was explaiing this a few years back to a geneticist i am now working with. he is constantly amazed by my insights way ahead of the curve.
so these sciecne arguments today, are now seldome about the actual points of the arbumetns. those are the fake fight on the wrong feild where the winner gets the prize..
the reason is that the real purpose cant be told and so they move this to a false feild and proxy fight.
so the stem cell fight is about fetus.
other fights are about stopping progress… the reason being “social justice”, which says that if i invent a cure for cancer today… the society has then incured a huge social justice cost as everyone who needs it dont instantly have it.
this is a methods to make progress stall bevcause any new invention causes so much disruption to the planned utopia, and is so unfair since everyone doesnt get it its not equal… so its to be avoided.
there are other parts in which the assault is on genetics so that genetics doesnt show that biology is destiny, after 40 years ago they declared the opposite.
there is even parts like i was reading a day or two where you have sociali scientists trying to apply relativism and leftist dogma to the hard sciences to disconnect them from impiracism!
the left doesnt want impiriacist thought… (goldberg went over this in liberal fascism). it would prove that their assertions from ideology were wrong, the ideology is vacant and we would start seeing things as what they are, not how they are labled.
so planned parenthood would be revealed as the soft eugenics project it ALWAYS was… (12% of population black, 40% of abortions are black. do the math).
so when you hear people arguing science today, its seldom on the merits of the science itself, and its now almost always about the hidden outcome that is in line with the argument outcome.
so if they convinced us that bush was kiling science, we would use stem cells from fetus and abortionwould be protected. the abortion arbument is the hidden outcome that is in line with the alternative argument that delivers the same condition but is more acceptable
Artfldgr:
http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/2008/01/brave-new-britain-permitting.html
(if you don’t know the site already, I think you’ll like it)
I am fully aware that they are able to make humans with animal genes, and that there *are* animals with human genes.
That does not mean that making someone who’s nearly human so that you can classify them as non-persons so as to do human experiments without *technically* having a human any less horrifying.
You are correct on the source of the hype for fetal stem cells, mostly; I think that the ability to get yet more money from abortion has something to do with it. Given the massive failures, especially compared to adult stem cells, it’s not science-based.
Neo,
Just recently I was thinking about the treatment of animals in certain situations. My parents have chickens that stay in a pen about 20 feet by ten feet most of the time. 12 adult chickens at present in that pen. They have roost to climb on and a place to nest and lay eggs so they have vertical space as well. In addition to the regular chicken food they get some corn and crushed oyster shells to eat. (For stronger egg shells) In the summer months they get regular helpings of culled tomatoes, squash, etc that are not good enough for the farmers market. Occasionally they are let out to eat grass and grasshoppers, but this had to be cut back when a local carnivour became so brave it began killing chickens in the middle of the day if no humans were near the chickens. ( Probably the elusive bobcat my father and I have both seen- when unarmed- in the daytime near the chicken house.) I am suprised my father has not pronounced a fatawah on the bobcat and waited with loaded gun- he has disgused it. Right now he is too busy raging war on the gophers who plagues these parts- and his newly planted vegetables- from their subterranean abode. In previous years he waged jihad on the crows with his shotgun hanging in its holster on his tractor- just like the old cowboys with their rifles in the horse mounted holster. The holster leather dryrotted and now he is reduced to a hip mounted cellphone for weaponary-such is modern life.
But back to the chickens. I have heard of chickens being kept in much tighter conditions and smaller than the ones I described above. They call them battery cages and the chickens are cramed in them -wing to wing-without hardly even room to turn around. PETA is right to protests this I believe. I say this as a meat eater who has killed animals while hunting and fishing.
I know you were talking about research, but things can go to far-either way.
I agree with you on this one.
PS. : I am still not voting for John McAmnesty.
J. B.- on chickens in the small cages– there have been studies that show they have the same stress levels as free-range chickens.
I sounds wildly silly, but…well, they are chickens. We can’t project too much on them, not when we can do actual studies to find out what the facts are, first, instead of using emotional arguments.
“There was something haunting about those photos.”
You said it Neo, I got heartsick looking at those poor monkeys when I was a kid, and things haven’t changed much. Still, considering where psychology was going, it looks like the appropriate dope slaps got administered to the anti-cuddlers as a result of this work. Well, his early work…
The main problem of psychology/social science is that these disciplines actually belong to philosophy domain, but pretending to be sciences and so attempt to apply scientific method to the fields where it is not really applicable.
Bastard “White Coats” – torturing helpless animals because they can – disgusting that government and uncaring society supports this vile research, which goes on an on and on……at the deadly, agonizing expense of the creatures of our world.
Zena,
are you saying that animals have faculties like you?
and you might not realize that vetrinarians will treat pets including pet rats, as well a sother animals… we have meds and treatments for them as a side adjunct to the research you are against.
in fact prior to that kind of information, we just laid them low.
living things are chaotic. and i mean that in the mathematical sense, not in the we act crazy sense.
there is no way to determine the reaction of a system without testing it on a system.
reality often behaves counterintuitively.
if you really want to stop the testing, then get out there and lobby for the state to allow humans to sacrifice and become the tests.
would you step up first? would you truly do the collective thing for animals and mankind and allow the medications that are to be used in cancer therapy? they would first have to give you the cancer, but i am sure you dont mind.
or will you visit the childrens hospitals and tell the kids with leukemia and other conditions that they are going to die, and there is no hope because you wont let testing be done?
are you willing to forgoe medical treatment in the future? are you willing to stand up and tell all the women hoping for more progress against breast cancer you shut down shop?
then you never realize that these animals live very brutal lives on their own, and that literally millions of them are born and supported that would never exist otherwise. most research not being the kind you imagine.
and if you found you had mice in your house or rats, would you leave food out for them or would you set traps or have someone else do it?
the more we move away from reality, the more we can make up things that dont fit or work with reality and become harmful.
without medicine and the kind of research done, we would still have things like small pox. your life expectancy before antibiotics and other nostrums was not much. prior to the modern era the average person lived to 25 or 30… with cleaner water and germ theory (proven with animals) we progressed till we live in a society so clean and so steril of the norms of life that we can detach from life and come up with all kinds of things that stem from thinking about things that in the past we wouldnt have had time to think of.
today we have enough time to think of things but we dont have enough time to understand them in detail. so we are forced to take a side based on an argument that plays on our ability to relate.
reality has something utopias dont. and thats no alternatives. reasearchers do try not to hurt animals, they try to be humane. they try to limit the numbers, and they have boards that review and go over the reasons for the research. usually much prior work in vitro has been done, and even on larger cell clusters. but nothing will replace a systemic test in reality.
either its done on the animals or the products are allowed to be sold without testing and we find out over the first few years of their usage.
but then you would be yelling at the horrible corporate people that cause misery by not testing their products.
not alternatives… you cant have it both ways, and the latter way is decidedly less good. it would require people to be tested on, or volunteer for it. hence my question above.
this is why so many policies on the left are touted as progressive but they are nothing but stagnation or regressive.
you cant rail wanting the poor and the sick and infirm to be healthier on one side… and have good medical care…
and then also say we have to stop the process that provides those things. you think medicine is expensive today, but in truth its not. economically speaking these new expensive devices over time become lower in price till tey are ubiquitous. just compare MRI in its first days to today. and the new research brings cheaper better functioning machines.
much of what is around you is actually a product of medicine, in that extending lives from an average of 25 years to 77 years, allows our average level of intellgence to be a lot higher. it allows experts to work for decades longer doing what they are good at.
if it werent for the meds, we would die around 25 – 30 on average, and thats it… thanks to them, you can contemplate their end. without them, you wouldnt have had a nice life at all.
Well, I generally try not to get too sentimental about animals but the photo of that monkey is heartbreaking and the idea of a “black isolation chamber” is beyond belief. Truly malevolent.
yeah maguro,
but lets look at the real outcome. these few monkeys taught us that there is a real biological link between social individuals and that link has to be healthy, and its key to producing healthy functional individuals.
what many might not realize, and expecially zena, is that after those tests, there came the knowlege that profoundly changed how we treat animals.
it also quashed the fascist socialist idea of raising kids by the state like farming. because the link between child and presumptive parent is a loop that if not satisified creates sick individuals.
its not malevolent… what color would you pick for a sensory deprivation experiment? the point was to show that that environment WAS harmful. now we know they are, we can now claim that putting a person into such would result in illness. its part of the arguments against solitary confinment of people. its part of the argument against certain acts because they are known not presumed to be harmful.
before the work, there was no actual way to know if it mattered. it might not. if the monkey were a lizard, or a chicken, it wouldnt have been malevolent and cruel.
you and i are part of the history AFTER the knowlege. its part of the reason why we have the idea that this isnt a good thing!!! as mentioned above, this was presented in school, and no one heard the teachers teaching that this should be ignroed.
without this there would still be an argument as to what constituted sufficient environment, and whether attachment is critical to good health.
and then there is the fact that there is no alternatives… no way to know other than to find out. if we didnt find out, i think suffering would have been much more as the issue would never be resolved, but be forbidden. and which way it went would have owed more to fashion than fact.
In my life I personally killed thousands of animals in laboratory and got desensitized to this. Most of them were mice, but also some rats, hamsters, rabbits, and what was especially hard for me, guinea pigs. I was lucky that I never had to use cats, dogs or primates in experiments, and I do not know if I have stomach to it. But in some fields of biomedical research such experiments are absolutely inavoidable. No new drug or even cosmetic formula can be tested for safety without it. This is the golden standard in pharmaceutics, and it is impossible to dump it.
Ah, that baby monkey clinging to the cloth surrogate is what I remember from my Psych 101 class over thirty years ago!
Artfldgr makes many excellent points in his/her posts. But I wonder about the “its part of the arguments against solitary confinment of people” defense for the isolation experiment.
Was it really necessary to suspend the monkeys upside down for months, years, at a time to learn the effects of “isolation”? What was the purpose of that little twist? To tell us what might happen to a human being hung upside down in total darkness for months/years at a time?
And I wonder how the scientists evaluated the devastating effects on the monkeys. To what degree were the effects caused by mere isolation? What was the effect of darkness? What was the effect of being suspended upside down for months or years at a time? How could they determine which of those circumstances broke the monkeys?
How DID they separate those various “causes” and their “effects”?
I read a footnote about Harlow and then I googled him. A week ago. Now I have no time for PETA loonies; I believe it’s increadibly frivolous to compare anything done to an animal to any aspect of the holocaust. I’m not an hysteric. If an animal needs to be infected with a disease to test out a potential cure – treated as humanley as possible – so be it. But I can’t shake this. This godawful lab was a private, university funded torture chamber for this evil, wretched sadist. Imagine him, every day for two years, going about his life – bonding with the kids, drinking too much, getting a good night’s sleep, accepting rewards and applause, grading papers, whatever he did – knowing every damn day that some utterly helpless, sentient creature was being broken beyond hope or repair in nearly unending incomprehension and misery. Two years! And over and over again. Why use one monkey when you can use dozens? These pontifications about how it never occurred to anybody that animals could feel anything before the 1950s. This is flatly not true, it’s a joke. Just because B.F. Skinner – another headcase – asserted it doesn’t make it recieved wisdom. And hell, if it ever had been recieved wisdom, Harlow wasn’t taken in by it. So refreshingly free of euphamism, wasn’t he? “Well of Despair”! “Rape Rack”! Ethics 101 covers this; an animal cannot be raped because it cannot give or withhold consent (an animal can be tortured). But Harlow liked the idea of a “Rape Rack”. He called his contaption a “Rape Rack” rather than, say, a “Restraint Device” because it gave him a kick to get away with this sh*t in broad daylight. Has anyone hear seen “American Psycho”? “I’m into murders and executions” the protagonist loudly informs everyone (nobody listens). These hateful experiments (which weren’t very likely to cure cancer), and especially this lovely “Well of Despair” perversion, are predicated on the assumption that a rhesus monkey responds to torture as a human would, that it has comparable faculties.
Okay. I’m not given to rants and I’m done this one. I’m sorry if I took up too much space. Piss on Harlow. I hope he can’t sue me for calling him names from beyond the grave. He seems like the type.
Well, he’s “beyond the grave”, I’m this side of it…