ipl-logo

Harlow's Monkey Experiment Essay

716 Words3 Pages

Harlow’s Monkey Experiment is one the amazing experiment that demonstrate how important of caring and loving are to the development of a child. Using the baby monkey as a test subject, Harry Frederick Harlow shown that, baby monkey is preferred love and companion of the “mother” over food. Harlow has taught us that, the relationship between the mother and the child is very important, and that relationship can determine how the child will develop later, of his or her life. This experiment shows how much attachment is linked to touch, the infant monkeys were separated at birth from their mothers, only given a piece of cloth, in the experiment. They used two different kinds of mother models, a Wire Mother and a Cloth Mother. The infant monkeys …show more content…

In one of the experiment called Bobo Doll by Albert Bandura in 1961 and 1963, a child observed an adult beating an inflatable clown to vent their frustration. The adult would punch, throw, and make verbal remarks about the clown. Then the child was placed in a room with toys and allowed to play to their hearts content. After a set amount of time, the toys except the inflatable were taken away for no reason, naturally the child was frustrated, and vented the frustration out on the inflatable. As they witnessed the adult do, they observed the adult do the behavior, and perceived it as normal behavior as well. In this case study with the monkeys, there was no observational learning, their actions were not learned, but they were natural reactions. The monkey was scared, and had no mother to find for comfort. So, they went to the closest thing they had to a mother to find their safety and comfort that they needed. This study was unethical, these doctors would have been fired and charged with other malpractice and animal cruelty charges. The kind of terror they used would not have been allowed by todays ethical

Open Document