Harry Harlow Influence On Child Psychology

Two American psychologists changed the ideas of development and behavior in humans through social experiments on monkeys. Harry and his wife Margaret’s contributions of research in the fields of motivation, affection, and learning have helped general and child psychologists. Together the couple unknowingly affected the way we treat children today.

Harry Harlow was born on October 31, 1905 in Fairfield, Iowa. He was actually born as Harry Israel but changed his name after he earned his Ph.D. He grew up in Iowa and later attended college in Oregon for one year. He enrolled at Stanford University after passing an aptitude test and became an English major. Eventually his grades were so bad that he switched his major to Psychology. While he attended

Through their many experiments involving monkeys the Harlow’s broke the code to deciphering children’s behavior and emotions and also how people react in family situations. In the early twentieth century, most psychologists thought that showing affection to children was purely sentimental and just occurred naturally. The Harlow’s disproved everyone’s prior knowledge on the fact. Harry Harlow wanted to do the opposite of other psychologists and measure something immeasurable: love. To test this topic, Harlow set up a Primate Laboratory where he mostly worked with Rhesus monkeys. Harlow ran multiple experiments with these monkeys proving different social behaviors. Even though Harlow’s tests were extremely helpful, they were also unethical and surprisingly cruel for a man researching how love

One of the robo-moms was made out of just wire. The other mother was the same as the first but it had cloth around it. Harlow’s first observation was that monkeys who got to choose their mother, spent more time clinging to the cloth surrogates, even when their food came from bottles mounted on the bare wire mothers. This implied that infant love was not a response of physical needs. The monkey’s attachment with the mothers was not primarily about hunger or thirst and it could not be reduced to nursing. It was touch and feeling and