Discussing the work of Harry Harlow. CW: animal cruelty.
Page 271-274Harlow and his team began his most famous study, separating baby monkeys from their mothers shortly after birth. The babies were placed in cages with two inanimate doll-like figures. One made of wire, one of cloth.
Both dolls were heated internally by a lightbulb, and only the wire version dispensed milk. The cloth mother’s face was framed by two bicycle reflectors in place of eyes – not realistic, exactly, but slightly more cheerful that the square, robot-like head they affexed to the top of the wire mother.
If babies truly only clutched their mothers because they wanted food, as was commonly believed, of course they’d prefer the wire monkey that fed them to the cloth version that contributed nothing.
But the monkeys spent almost all their time clinging to the cloth mothers, sometimes straining from them to reach the bottle affixed to the wire mother while keeping their feet planted on the cloth, or jumping to the wire just long enough to drink before rushing back to their maternal perch.
Plush fabric is a more comfortable resting place that woven wire, but the monkeys did more than hang out on the soft figure the way they would a bed or blanket. They cuddled into it, they ran to it when they were started, and they sometimes stroked the cloth and the edges of its plastic face.
When scientists reached in to change and clean the fabric, a partition separated the baby from its inanimate mother, and the babies hurled themselves against the divider, maniacally tracing the lines of the cafe in jagged panic. They’d grown dependent on a parent who never returned their affections, and it led to a kind of addiction in which they were incapable of functioning without her. They tore out their fur, biting their arms and legs.
But attachedment isn’t necessarily love. How much the monkeys really cared for the unliving figures, Harlow thought, was still up for debate. So he created new models to mimic abuse. The babies clung even tighter to the mothers designed to push them away.