DE-CON-STRUCT-ING HARRY
When UW psychology professor Harry Harlow began exploring the social behavior of monkeys in the 1950s, he sent science in a novel and — even today — controversial direction. In her new book, Professor Deborah Blum writes that it was love that led Harlow down that path. From "The Perfect Mother," the sixth chapter of Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, published September 2002 by Perseus Publishing, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
By Deborah Blum MA'82
By Deborah Blum MA'82
Harry Harlow did not step directly into studying love; there was no triumphant flourish of research trumpets. In 1955, he had an entirely different problem, more pragmatic, more urgent. It had to do with importing monkeys. He was beginning to hate it.
The monkeys that Harry studied in his UW lab were hard to get. They were expensive. They were often in terrible shape. Monkeys routinely turned up starving, battered in passage, seething with "ghastly diseases." The hot-tempered, tropical viruses spread easily. The incoming macaques infected cage-mates. Playmates sickened alongside monkey playmates. Macaque mothers passed diseases to their infants. A laboratory with a new shipment of monkeys could more easily resemble a hospital than a research laboratory.
So Harry was thinking about raising his own animals. It was this decision that would, indirectly, lead him into the science of affection. When it did — when he first started wondering if you can raise a healthy child, even a monkey child, without love — the people working with him would think he'd gone crazy.
Of course, they were used to Harry Harlow's crazy ideas. Starting a breeding colony in Madison struck plenty of people as evidence enough of lunacy. The Midwestern climate, almost the polar opposite of the balmy Indian seasons, seemed an unlikely place to start raising tropical species. But Harry had been accommodating monkeys for years. He figured that they'd just continue bundling the monkeys inside. That would keep the colony compact, no more than he could house indoors. He could live with that.
The monkeys that Harry studied in his UW lab were hard to get. They were expensive. They were often in terrible shape. Monkeys routinely turned up starving, battered in passage, seething with "ghastly diseases." The hot-tempered, tropical viruses spread easily. The incoming macaques infected cage-mates. Playmates sickened alongside monkey playmates. Macaque mothers passed diseases to their infants. A laboratory with a new shipment of monkeys could more easily resemble a hospital than a research laboratory.
So Harry was thinking about raising his own animals. It was this decision that would, indirectly, lead him into the science of affection. When it did — when he first started wondering if you can raise a healthy child, even a monkey child, without love — the people working with him would think he'd gone crazy.
Of course, they were used to Harry Harlow's crazy ideas. Starting a breeding colony in Madison struck plenty of people as evidence enough of lunacy. The Midwestern climate, almost the polar opposite of the balmy Indian seasons, seemed an unlikely place to start raising tropical species. But Harry had been accommodating monkeys for years. He figured that they'd just continue bundling the monkeys inside. That would keep the colony compact, no more than he could house indoors. He could live with that.
There was another, bigger hitch. No one really knew how to do what he wanted. There were no self-sustaining colonies of monkeys in the United States. Domestic breeding of primates was a brand-new, barely simmering idea. Other people were talking about it; researchers from California to Connecticut were equally frustrated. But no one had any experience at breeding monkeys on the scale he imagined. Only a few American scientists had even tried hand-raising the animals in any systematic way, and that had been on a monkey-by-monkey kind of scale. Did this faze Harry? Not really.
Harry and his university colleagues decided to approach the problem like the scientists they were. What to feed a baby monkey? William Stone, from the university's biochemistry department, spent countless hours testing formulas. Years later, he would remark that "I can still smell the monkeys as I recall sleeping at the primate lab on a four-hour schedule" in order to try out different recipes on the baby monkeys. Stone eventually had so much data that he published a paper on the immune effects of feeding cattle serum to newborn monkeys. Stone began with a baby formula of sugar, evaporated milk, and water. He recruited students to hold doll-sized bottles to feed the monkeys. Every bottle was sterilized. The monkeys got vitamins every day. Their daily dose included iron extracts, penicillin and other antibiotics, glucose, and "constant, tender, loving care." The baby monkeys were washed, weighed, and watched over constantly. As the monkeys grew older, lab caretakers mixed fresh fruit and bread into their diet. And always, always, the caretakers kept the animals apart from each other. Every monkey in a separate cage. Every baby taken from its mother, which is why someone needed to hold those baby bottles. Harry wanted no chances taken on the spread of those ghastly diseases. Everything was polished and cleaned and disinfected and wiped to a glittering cleanliness.
Harry and his university colleagues decided to approach the problem like the scientists they were. What to feed a baby monkey? William Stone, from the university's biochemistry department, spent countless hours testing formulas. Years later, he would remark that "I can still smell the monkeys as I recall sleeping at the primate lab on a four-hour schedule" in order to try out different recipes on the baby monkeys. Stone eventually had so much data that he published a paper on the immune effects of feeding cattle serum to newborn monkeys. Stone began with a baby formula of sugar, evaporated milk, and water. He recruited students to hold doll-sized bottles to feed the monkeys. Every bottle was sterilized. The monkeys got vitamins every day. Their daily dose included iron extracts, penicillin and other antibiotics, glucose, and "constant, tender, loving care." The baby monkeys were washed, weighed, and watched over constantly. As the monkeys grew older, lab caretakers mixed fresh fruit and bread into their diet. And always, always, the caretakers kept the animals apart from each other. Every monkey in a separate cage. Every baby taken from its mother, which is why someone needed to hold those baby bottles. Harry wanted no chances taken on the spread of those ghastly diseases. Everything was polished and cleaned and disinfected and wiped to a glittering cleanliness.
There was a model for such practices, of course, in human medicine, in the frantic efforts of early pediatricians to control disease in orphanages and hospitals. The Wisconsin researchers mimicked perfectly, had they realized it, the very hospital policies that Harry Bakwin had been so furiously trying to undo in the 1940s. Harry and his colleagues were inadvertently recreating those isolationist pediatric wards.
By the end of 1956, the lab managers had taken more than sixty baby monkeys away from their mothers, tucked them into a neatly kept nursery, usually within six to twelve hours after a monkey's birth. Lab staffers fed the infant animals meticulously, every two hours, with the carefully researched formula from the tiny doll bottles. And the monkeys looked good. The little animals gained weight on that formula. They were bigger than usual, heftier and healthier-looking. And they were purified of infection, "disease free without any doubt," wrote Harry. But their appearance, he added, turned out to be deceptive. "In many other ways they were not free at all."
By the end of 1956, the lab managers had taken more than sixty baby monkeys away from their mothers, tucked them into a neatly kept nursery, usually within six to twelve hours after a monkey's birth. Lab staffers fed the infant animals meticulously, every two hours, with the carefully researched formula from the tiny doll bottles. And the monkeys looked good. The little animals gained weight on that formula. They were bigger than usual, heftier and healthier-looking. And they were purified of infection, "disease free without any doubt," wrote Harry. But their appearance, he added, turned out to be deceptive. "In many other ways they were not free at all."
The monkeys seemed dumbfounded by loneliness. They would sit rocking, staring into the air, sucking their thumbs. When the monkeys were older and the scientists tried to bring them together for breeding, the animals simply backed away. They might stare at each other. They might even make a few tentative gestures, as if each primate vaguely wished for friendship. But the nursery-raised monkeys had no idea what to do with each other. They seemed startled by the appearance of another animal, intimidated by the sight of such odd, furry strangers. The monkeys were so unnerved by each other that many of them would simply stare at the floor of the cage, refusing to look up. "We had created a brooding, not a breeding, colony," Harry once said.
How could the monkeys look so healthy and be so completely unhealthy in their behavior? They had a growing number of sturdy, bright-eyed, bizarre animals in their cages. Not all of the animals were so unstable. But enough were to keep the researchers up at night. Harry was driven to making lists of possibilities. What was he doing wrong? Could it be the light cycle; was the lab not dark enough at night? The antibiotics? Perhaps the medicines were skewing normal development. The formula? It might be that evaporated milk wasn't such a good thing. Maybe the baby monkeys were getting too much sugar — or not enough.
How could the monkeys look so healthy and be so completely unhealthy in their behavior? They had a growing number of sturdy, bright-eyed, bizarre animals in their cages. Not all of the animals were so unstable. But enough were to keep the researchers up at night. Harry was driven to making lists of possibilities. What was he doing wrong? Could it be the light cycle; was the lab not dark enough at night? The antibiotics? Perhaps the medicines were skewing normal development. The formula? It might be that evaporated milk wasn't such a good thing. Maybe the baby monkeys were getting too much sugar — or not enough.
He and students and colleagues were talking it over as the coffee steamed, the bridge cards shuffled, and the nights burned away in the lab. Harry's research crew was still growing and, on the recommendation of his old professor, Calvin Stone, he'd brought another Stanford graduate into his lab. His Stanford PhD barely off the presses, William Mason found himself immediately plunged into the problem of the not-quite-right baby monkeys.
Shortly after arriving, Mason was put in charge of raising six newborn animals. These were all lab-made orphans, taken away from their mothers some two hours after birth. In Harry's lab, the monkeys often had names instead of the numbers that are standard in primate labs today. The oldest of Mason's orphans was Millstone, named by a lab tech because the little monkey was such a noisy, clingy pest. The other five infants also joined the Stone family: Grindstone, Rhinestone, Loadstone, Brimstone, and Earthstone. A research assistant at the lab, Nancy Blazek, had feeding duties. Exhausted by the two-hour schedule, she took to bringing the little monkeys home with her for their nighttime bottles.
Shortly after arriving, Mason was put in charge of raising six newborn animals. These were all lab-made orphans, taken away from their mothers some two hours after birth. In Harry's lab, the monkeys often had names instead of the numbers that are standard in primate labs today. The oldest of Mason's orphans was Millstone, named by a lab tech because the little monkey was such a noisy, clingy pest. The other five infants also joined the Stone family: Grindstone, Rhinestone, Loadstone, Brimstone, and Earthstone. A research assistant at the lab, Nancy Blazek, had feeding duties. Exhausted by the two-hour schedule, she took to bringing the little monkeys home with her for their nighttime bottles.
Mason and Blazek spent hours with those monkeys and they really got to know them. They wanted the babies to grow strong and healthy. Mason planned to continue some of the earlier studies on curiosity. Harry had established that monkeys were naturally curious. Mason wondered how early that trait showed up. When did monkeys start to wonder about the world around them? Were they born asking questions or did they pick up it up later? When it came to puzzles, at least, Mason and Blazek found that the Stone babies were naturals. As soon as they were coordinated enough to work a puzzle, the little creatures were busy trying to solve it. The results reinforced a strong suspicion that curiosity was fundamental to the way these small primates approached the world.
There was something else about the Stone monkeys that caught the lab workers' attention. The researchers had been lining the cages with cloth diapers, to provide a little softness and warmth against the floor. All the little monkeys, including those in the Stone family, were absolutely, fanatically attached to those diapers. They hugged the diapers fiercely. They would sit wrapped in the white cloth, clutch it desperately if someone picked them up. Around the lab, an observer might be struck by the appearance of baby monkeys, in transit, with cloth streaming out behind them like a kite's tail.
There was something else about the Stone monkeys that caught the lab workers' attention. The researchers had been lining the cages with cloth diapers, to provide a little softness and warmth against the floor. All the little monkeys, including those in the Stone family, were absolutely, fanatically attached to those diapers. They hugged the diapers fiercely. They would sit wrapped in the white cloth, clutch it desperately if someone picked them up. Around the lab, an observer might be struck by the appearance of baby monkeys, in transit, with cloth streaming out behind them like a kite's tail.
There was already a hint about this cloth-obsession from the nineteenth century, out of the diaries of a British naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace. The adventurous Wallace is best remembered now because he so nearly published a theory of evolution before Charles Darwin. As with Darwin, it was traveling that made the theory come to life. Exploring the oddly different and beautifully adapted species of each country also made Wallace think about the way nature tucks us into our niches. During a visit to Indonesia, Wallace had been given an orphaned baby orangutan. He wrote in his journal that the little animal seemed to be constantly reaching for and cuddling soft material, including (painfully) Wallace's beard. Trying to help the baby and himself, Wallace made what he called a "stuffed mother" out of a roll of buffalo skin. He noted that the little ape clung happily to the fat, fuzzy roll, no longer grabbing for other material. The baby orangutan became frustrated only when he tried to nurse.
And there was another more recent clue from a Yale University researcher famed for her meticulous comparisons of monkey and human anatomy. To do detailed analysis, Gertrude Van Wagenen had needed a reliable supply of monkeys. She'd created a small nursery and written an insightful chapter on her technique for raising baby monkeys. Van Wagenen had found that her nursery-raised monkeys bonded almost compulsively to the soft blankets lining their baskets. She described their tight clutch as emotional dependency, noting that if the infant monkeys couldn't cuddle, some of them didn't even develop proper feeding responses. "You know of the debt I owe to you for the creation of the rhesus baby in the basket," Harry wrote her, late in his career. "The early research, which I conducted according to your directions, started me off in the field of primate affection."
And, indeed, the psychologists in his primate lab were beginning to wonder if there was a real message in the behavior of their baby monkeys. Perhaps the small animals had something to tell them about the needs of children. After all, it wasn't monkeys alone who clung to soft cloth. It was orangutans, too, and other labs reported that baby chimpanzees desperately hugged blankets. Nancy Blazek and Bill Mason, watching the monkeys cling to the cloth, started wondering about that need to hold on. There was that other primate to consider in this idea. All of them knew that human babies, left alone in a crib, also clutched their quilts and pillows and fluffy stuffed toys. But what did that mean? No one really knew.
Mason suggested to Harry that they run a test. He was thinking of a simple comparison between, say, a fat bundle of cloth and something hard — wood or wire. The researchers could see what the babies preferred — if it was just the need to hold onto something, anything, or if there was something especially meaningful about a soft touch.
Mason suggested to Harry that they run a test. He was thinking of a simple comparison between, say, a fat bundle of cloth and something hard — wood or wire. The researchers could see what the babies preferred — if it was just the need to hold onto something, anything, or if there was something especially meaningful about a soft touch.
And the idea just clicked for Harry. He liked it immediately. He also thought there might be something even bigger lurking there. Perhaps the differences between cloth and wood only touched on part of the underlying question. After all, babies don't prefer to hold onto pieces of cloth to all else. They hold onto them when there's no human — or monkey — available for cuddling. The soft bits of cloth might be a substitute for something that mothers do that's missing. Today, of course, we would include fathers but this was the 1950s and at this moment, in science and society alike, it was mother who represented what parents had to give a child.
So, if Harry was right, if they were looking at an odd, pathetic kind of mother substitute in these blankets, then they were also looking at raising a revolution in psychology. If the baby monkeys were telling them that there was something critical in being touched, being held, and holding back, then they could start rewriting the psychology books. And the first new sentence in that book might say that mothers themselves — with their soft arms and inclination to hold a baby close — were desperately important, and if that was right, then the Watsonian, Skinnerian, Hullian view of the world could be nothing less than wrong.
So, if Harry was right, if they were looking at an odd, pathetic kind of mother substitute in these blankets, then they were also looking at raising a revolution in psychology. If the baby monkeys were telling them that there was something critical in being touched, being held, and holding back, then they could start rewriting the psychology books. And the first new sentence in that book might say that mothers themselves — with their soft arms and inclination to hold a baby close — were desperately important, and if that was right, then the Watsonian, Skinnerian, Hullian view of the world could be nothing less than wrong.
Harry used to say that the idea for a lab-built mother occurred to him on a Northwest Airlines flight between Detroit and Madison, looking out at the puffy, deceptively soft clouds blowing on the other side of the glass: "As I turned to look out the window, I suddenly saw a vision of the cloth surrogate mother sitting beside me." A lab-created doll of a mother, as deceptively soft as those floating clouds, could be used as a way to see what a baby really wanted. It would be a comparison, as Bill Mason suggested, but it would be a comparison using a mother figure, one that looked like a mother obviously enough that anyone could see that this was not only about monkeys.
Harry Harlow had encouraged the students and employees in his lab to think for themselves. They didn't hesitate in this case. They thought he was wrong. As far as Harry could tell, his students thought that their major professor had left his head in the clouds: "My enthusiastic descent upon the laboratory was met by skepticism or lack of interest from one graduate student after another." He was finally able, he said, to convince one of his newer graduate students, Robert Zimmerman, to give it a try. "But I'll tell you one thing about those damn airplane rides when we were on the surrogate project," says Bob Zimmerman, now retired in Lansing, Michigan. "Every time Harry would fly somewhere — and he went away every week because he was on all kinds of committees — he'd run into some shrink or somebody, and he would come back with some new idea about what we should be doing with the surrogate. He'd always wonder when he came back, 'Why don't we have this? So and so said we should have rocking, why don't we have rocking?'''
Harry Harlow had encouraged the students and employees in his lab to think for themselves. They didn't hesitate in this case. They thought he was wrong. As far as Harry could tell, his students thought that their major professor had left his head in the clouds: "My enthusiastic descent upon the laboratory was met by skepticism or lack of interest from one graduate student after another." He was finally able, he said, to convince one of his newer graduate students, Robert Zimmerman, to give it a try. "But I'll tell you one thing about those damn airplane rides when we were on the surrogate project," says Bob Zimmerman, now retired in Lansing, Michigan. "Every time Harry would fly somewhere — and he went away every week because he was on all kinds of committees — he'd run into some shrink or somebody, and he would come back with some new idea about what we should be doing with the surrogate. He'd always wonder when he came back, 'Why don't we have this? So and so said we should have rocking, why don't we have rocking?'''
Zimmerman is laughing when he tells this story. He agrees that Harry was right about one thing — most of the students fled from getting sucked into a project as mushy, as un-Wisconsin, as mother love. "In all honesty, nobody, no grad student, wanted to touch the mother surrogate project with a ten-foot pole. This was Wisconsin, and Harry could be of some help, but you had to get your thesis or dissertation past a committee, and to talk about love at the University of Wisconsin, where everything was numbers and statistics — I think the first assumption was that if you took that one you'd never graduate.
"Well, I was already working with neonatal learning, and nothing much was being done with the babies in the first ninety days of life, before they were ready for those experiments, and I thought, well, I have an investment in these monkeys, so I made a deal with Harry. I would be the ramrod for the mother surrogate project if he would let me have the baby monkeys for my dissertation. And he thought that would be a fair trade."
"Well, I was already working with neonatal learning, and nothing much was being done with the babies in the first ninety days of life, before they were ready for those experiments, and I thought, well, I have an investment in these monkeys, so I made a deal with Harry. I would be the ramrod for the mother surrogate project if he would let me have the baby monkeys for my dissertation. And he thought that would be a fair trade."
The airplane birth of the surrogate mother — the way Harry would tell it, full of drama and imagery — says a lot about Harry's vision for the project. Here was science at its most provocative — mother love at a time when British psychiatrist John Bowlby could barely persuade his colleagues to join the words mother and love together. Here also was science with real potential to make a difference, to make people see families and relationships in a different way, a closer way. The first challenge would be getting people to take it seriously.
That was going to take both solid research and, Harry suspected, all the skills at making an idea compelling that he had acquired over the years, all the unflinching stubbornness he had learned while he wangled a laboratory from the University of Wisconsin and persuaded his colleagues that maybe, just maybe, monkeys were smarter than they thought. If he wanted an attentive audience — and, oh, he really did — the surrogate mother was going to be a Harry Harlow production.
That was going to take both solid research and, Harry suspected, all the skills at making an idea compelling that he had acquired over the years, all the unflinching stubbornness he had learned while he wangled a laboratory from the University of Wisconsin and persuaded his colleagues that maybe, just maybe, monkeys were smarter than they thought. If he wanted an attentive audience — and, oh, he really did — the surrogate mother was going to be a Harry Harlow production.
His newly minted Stanford researcher, Bill Mason, was stunned by how rapidly his small, neat idea became a showstopper. "I didn't see it as a breakthrough or something really sensational," Mason says. "It was a kind of demonstration with a foregone conclusion." There was Wallace, after all, there was Van Wagenen; everyone in the lab expected the monkeys to prefer the cloth. They worked out a kind of trial balloon. Zimmerman teamed with another graduate student, Lorna Benjamin, and the two of them did a simple first test with two baby monkeys. Both the little animals flatly rejected a wire object in favor of a cloth bundle. "It was unbelievably clear, amazing," Zimmerman says, and suddenly the lab crew began to wonder if Harry Harlow was going to pull this love stuff off after all.
From that first experiment, Harry wanted everything nailed, every detail noted, every possible criticism identified and answered. He insisted on two observers for every experiment with the little animals, one student double-checking the other. He devised careful charts to score the monkeys' behavior. Harry and his students filmed the experiments and then spent hours scrutinizing each frame, right down to the clasp of the fingers on the cloth. "He was concerned it would be rejected out of hand if we didn't nail it to the floor," Zimmerman said.
From that first experiment, Harry wanted everything nailed, every detail noted, every possible criticism identified and answered. He insisted on two observers for every experiment with the little animals, one student double-checking the other. He devised careful charts to score the monkeys' behavior. Harry and his students filmed the experiments and then spent hours scrutinizing each frame, right down to the clasp of the fingers on the cloth. "He was concerned it would be rejected out of hand if we didn't nail it to the floor," Zimmerman said.
Mason still remembers, with admiration, Harry's skill at taking a long-dismissed idea — that mother love was a crucial part of a child's development — and persuading his colleagues to listen to him. "The dominant position was that babies didn't love their mothers or need them, that the only relationship was based on being fed," Mason says. "It sounds silly now but that's what people thought. Harlow sensed people were beginning to ask questions. And it was damn right to ask questions, because the dominant position wasn't true. These are facts — monkeys don't just explore for food, they do it because they are curious, they have a drive to know. And they are social and they need to interact. Harlow had a great sense of when he could get away with challenging the field. If he had misjudged that — if he had been younger, less skillful — it would have been a disaster. People would have laughed."
Skillful or not, there was no doubt that Harry was yet again on the wrong side of behaviorist psychology. B.F. Skinner was now experimenting with boxes in which to raise not just rats but young children. Skinner had built the first demonstration model for his younger daughter, Debbie. It was a crib-sized "living space" with sound-absorbing walls — a baby-tender, Skinner called it — with a large window and a canvas floor. The air in the box was filtered and humidified, and the baby stayed so clean in there that Skinner said she only needed bathing twice a week. The partial soundproofing meant that the child was undisturbed by doorbells and ringing phones — or the voices of her parents and sister. Debbie came out for scheduled playtimes and meals: "One whole side of the compartment is safety glass, through which we all talk and gesture to her during the day. She greets us with a big smile when we look at her through the window," Skinner wrote in a letter to a friend, emphasizing the advantages of raising your baby in a box. He hoped that every mother would one day use a baby-tender. Skinner wrote once of being surprised when a pediatrician suggested the box might be better used in hospitals, where it could save nurses much work. It could save mothers work, too, Skinner replied. The doctor laughed. Mothers didn't care so much about the saved labor, he assured the psychologist. Mothers labored out of love.
"The universal reaction, was, 'What is this love?' " recalls former grad student Leonard Rosenblum. "The only emotions studied in animals were negative — fear, loathing, pain. The idea that animals were motivated by love, what vague notion was this?" Rosenblum makes a dismissive gesture, indicating the disdain of the time. It's been a long time since he was a fledgling psychologist himself. He recently retired as director of a primate laboratory in Brooklyn, part of the State University of New York system. Today Rosenblum is an internationally known expert in developmental biology, an angular man with bright blue eyes and a slightly shaggy, silvery beard. He retains, though, the same intensity and lively humor and flair for a dramatic turn of phrase that he had as a student in Harry's laboratory.
"Remember," Rosenblum says, "that behaviorism's beginnings, with John Watson, suggested that it was a great thing to dig holes in the backyard and let your kids fall in and learn about life. So in psychology, love was smoke, mirrors, bullshit, and that was exactly what everyone was telling Harry." Of course, Harry was used to being told he was on the wrong side of an issue, the backside of the fence. He'd come to kind of enjoy needling the smugness of the mainstream position. He simply began assembling his evidence. Beyond that, he started thinking about how to make that evidence look really, really good. Bill Mason had proposed that they look at how monkeys might hold onto a bundle of cloth. And that was a start, said Harry, but they needed their surrogate to look like more than a bundle. It needed to have some personality. It needed a head and a face. If monkeys were going to look at this substitute mother, it needed to look back at them. And it needed to look back at the human observers, too — it needed to mean something real to people, as well. Harry wanted them all — not just psychologists, but mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and stepparents and grandparents — to think about connection and affection. He wanted them to believe that emotions and relationships were the proper purview of research.
Harry's students still sometimes argue about the decision to put a head on the cloth mother. Mason considers the head merely showmanship rather than necessary to testing monkeys, who after all would happily cuddle with a diaper. Others consider it strategy. One such former student, Steve Suomi, now head of primate behavioral research at the National Institutes of Health, still thinks of the head as a kind of brilliant tactical move. "So it might not have been relevant to monkeys," Suomi says. "But it was to the outside world, because once people looked at the surrogate like a mother — made a connection to human mothers as well — then you could start talking about things like mother love."
And despite the fears by Mason, and even Bob Zimmerman, that the head was going to get them laughed out of psychology, Harry was absolutely determined. He had suddenly been given a first-class platform for his arguments. He'd finally been elected president of the American Psychological Association. And he was going use that, he decided, to pound the podium and make his argument. He was absolutely sure of what he was going to argue. He even had a title. He was going to call his talk "The Nature of Love." And as Zimmerman still remembers, "He came back into the laboratory and said to me, 'Bob, I have written one of the finest speeches ever delivered to the APA as president. Go get me the data.'"
And despite the fears by Mason, and even Bob Zimmerman, that the head was going to get them laughed out of psychology, Harry was absolutely determined. He had suddenly been given a first-class platform for his arguments. He'd finally been elected president of the American Psychological Association. And he was going use that, he decided, to pound the podium and make his argument. He was absolutely sure of what he was going to argue. He even had a title. He was going to call his talk "The Nature of Love." And as Zimmerman still remembers, "He came back into the laboratory and said to me, 'Bob, I have written one of the finest speeches ever delivered to the APA as president. Go get me the data.'"
So they put a plain wooden ball on top of the bundled body. Harry still wasn't satisfied. "It doesn't have a face," he said. By this time, Bob Zimmerman had fully taken over the project, and he was willing, if he had to, to put a face on the surrogate mother. Harry had recruited Zimmerman from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. Zimmerman was a tall, lanky man with dark hair trimmed into a ruthless crewcut. He was a promising and ambitious young psychologist. Zimmerman had gotten three offers from graduate schools, but Harry had written "the most beautiful letter" about Wisconsin and the land and support the school could offer. After Zimmerman was properly seduced, he remembers, Harry wanted the letter back. It had worked so well, he wanted to try it on the next year's crop of recruits.
Oh, that head was a challenge. "First, it had to be designed to be pretty nondestructive," Zimmerman says. "Monkeys are very destructive creatures." And then it had to have eyes. Mothers have eyes, Harry said. So what are we going to do for eyes? So I go to these dolls' hospitals and stuff, looking for eyes. If you've ever seen dolls' eyes, they're so fragile. And I said, 'Well, we need something that's a little stronger, that can take a knocking around.'
Oh, that head was a challenge. "First, it had to be designed to be pretty nondestructive," Zimmerman says. "Monkeys are very destructive creatures." And then it had to have eyes. Mothers have eyes, Harry said. So what are we going to do for eyes? So I go to these dolls' hospitals and stuff, looking for eyes. If you've ever seen dolls' eyes, they're so fragile. And I said, 'Well, we need something that's a little stronger, that can take a knocking around.'
"So this woman at the doll store says, 'Well, they're pretty expensive.'
"I said, 'Price is no object.'"
Zimmerman is grinning again as he tells this story, dark eyes crinkling at the corners. "So she says, 'You must work for the state.'"
They kept shopping. They didn't just want indestructible eyes. They wanted eyes that were also repulsive to monkeys. Harry had warned Art Schmidt, the resident equipment-building genius, and Zimmerman that the cloth mothers could not have faces that monkeys obviously found attractive. "Because then someone could say, hey, your experiment had nothing to do with touch or being held — it's just that it's an attractive stimulus," Zimmerman said. Critics might dismiss the cuddle effect and argue that the babies liked the way the face looked, and that was why they clung to the softer body. "So we started fooling around with different configurations of faces, and then we would see how the monkeys reacted." They decided on bicycle reflectors for the eyes, which gave the face a bug-like stare. "Those are red bicycle reflectors. The mouth was green plastic, curved in a half moon smile. And the ears were a very hard black plastic that Art Schmidt had hanging around the lab. The nose was maple, painted black."
"I said, 'Price is no object.'"
Zimmerman is grinning again as he tells this story, dark eyes crinkling at the corners. "So she says, 'You must work for the state.'"
They kept shopping. They didn't just want indestructible eyes. They wanted eyes that were also repulsive to monkeys. Harry had warned Art Schmidt, the resident equipment-building genius, and Zimmerman that the cloth mothers could not have faces that monkeys obviously found attractive. "Because then someone could say, hey, your experiment had nothing to do with touch or being held — it's just that it's an attractive stimulus," Zimmerman said. Critics might dismiss the cuddle effect and argue that the babies liked the way the face looked, and that was why they clung to the softer body. "So we started fooling around with different configurations of faces, and then we would see how the monkeys reacted." They decided on bicycle reflectors for the eyes, which gave the face a bug-like stare. "Those are red bicycle reflectors. The mouth was green plastic, curved in a half moon smile. And the ears were a very hard black plastic that Art Schmidt had hanging around the lab. The nose was maple, painted black."
Schmidt and Zimmerman had even labored over what kind of wood to use for the heads. They'd tried pine wood balls. But the energetic monkeys chewed the soft wood into splinters. Zimmerman remembers complaining to Harry, saying "Dr. Harlow, the monkeys are destroying the heads. As fast as we make them, they're chewing 'em up."
And he remembers Harry looking at him, completely deadpan, and replying, "Children have been destroying their parents for years." The researchers decided to use hardwood for the heads. They settled on maple croquet balls, near rock-like in their construction.
And he remembers Harry looking at him, completely deadpan, and replying, "Children have been destroying their parents for years." The researchers decided to use hardwood for the heads. They settled on maple croquet balls, near rock-like in their construction.
In point of fact, babies do chew on their parents, pull their hair, gnaw on their ears, drool on their shoulders, and throw up all over their shirts. Zimmerman points out that if you watch a baby monkey with its natural mother, the little guy will tug on fur, nibble on ears, yank and pull — all in affection. They'll do the same thing to a father monkey, given a chance. And this is not destruction at all — it's curiosity, touch, feel, and the infinite security of being held by someone who will put up with all that tugging and chewing. But monkeys and babies — as Bowlby had been trying to say — indulge in those behaviors only with someone they love and trust.
One of the surrogate mothers in Harry's lab had a head but no face. The head was just a blank ball of wood. A baby monkey arrived a month early. Schmidt and Zimmerman had not yet perfected the smiling mother face. So they put the animal in with the faceless cloth mother. "To the baby monkey, this featureless face became beautiful, and she frequently caressed it with hands and legs," Harry said. That lasted for about three months. "By the time the baby had reached ninety days, we had constructed an appropriate ornamental cloth-mother face, and we proudly mounted it on the surrogate's body. The baby took one look and screamed."
One of the surrogate mothers in Harry's lab had a head but no face. The head was just a blank ball of wood. A baby monkey arrived a month early. Schmidt and Zimmerman had not yet perfected the smiling mother face. So they put the animal in with the faceless cloth mother. "To the baby monkey, this featureless face became beautiful, and she frequently caressed it with hands and legs," Harry said. That lasted for about three months. "By the time the baby had reached ninety days, we had constructed an appropriate ornamental cloth-mother face, and we proudly mounted it on the surrogate's body. The baby took one look and screamed."
The little monkey huddled in the back of the cage, rocking in dismay. After several days, the infant solved the problem. She marched up and rotated the head 180 degrees so that the blank back of the ball faced forward. The scientists turned it back. She turned it again. They turned it. She turned it. "We could rotate the maternal face dozens of times and within an hour or so, the infant would turn it around 180 degrees." Within a week, the baby resolved the problem entirely. She took the head off and rolled it into a corner of the cage and ignored it. And she was willing to repeat this; calmly, Harry said, and with infinite patience. He knew exactly what such behavior represented. Bowlby's theory predicted that one of the ways that a baby bonds to a particular mother comes from its recognition of "the particular mother's face." It's that absolute sureness that this is my mother, that she's here, that makes everything all right.
The baby doesn't attach to just anyone, and John Bowlby and Harry Harlow and a growing army of others were going to make that undeniably clear. There's an actual relationship here that matters; the baby recognizes this one special person as the one. Later studies at Wisconsin showed that monkeys definitely did not admire the face dreamed up by Zimmerman and built by Schmidt. They preferred a dog's face to the bug-eyed, green-smiled version of a mother. But to Harry, the antipathy also made a critical point. The infants might not like the mother's face, he said, but they loved the mother. She could have a blank face, a bug face, any face that they knew well — as long as she had mom's face. To a baby, mother's face is always beautiful, he said: "A mother's face that will stop a clock will not stop a baby."
The baby doesn't attach to just anyone, and John Bowlby and Harry Harlow and a growing army of others were going to make that undeniably clear. There's an actual relationship here that matters; the baby recognizes this one special person as the one. Later studies at Wisconsin showed that monkeys definitely did not admire the face dreamed up by Zimmerman and built by Schmidt. They preferred a dog's face to the bug-eyed, green-smiled version of a mother. But to Harry, the antipathy also made a critical point. The infants might not like the mother's face, he said, but they loved the mother. She could have a blank face, a bug face, any face that they knew well — as long as she had mom's face. To a baby, mother's face is always beautiful, he said: "A mother's face that will stop a clock will not stop a baby."
The nature of love project was absolutely, beautifully straightforward in its design.
Art Schmidt built — as Bill Mason had first proposed — not one but two, "surrogate mothers." The first was a cloth mother. She had that smiling face on a round head and a cylindrical body. The cloth mother was made from a block of wood, covered with sponge rubber, and sheathed in tan cotton terrycloth. A light bulb behind her back radiated heat. You could call her an ideal mother, Harry said, "soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or hit her baby in error." The other mother had a squared, flattish face with two dark holes for eyes and a frowning mouth. Beneath that scowling visage was another cylindrical body, also warmed by a light bulb, but this time made of wire mesh. It was perfect for climbing, but wire mother had not a cuddly angle to her. She was metallic all the way through.
Art Schmidt built — as Bill Mason had first proposed — not one but two, "surrogate mothers." The first was a cloth mother. She had that smiling face on a round head and a cylindrical body. The cloth mother was made from a block of wood, covered with sponge rubber, and sheathed in tan cotton terrycloth. A light bulb behind her back radiated heat. You could call her an ideal mother, Harry said, "soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or hit her baby in error." The other mother had a squared, flattish face with two dark holes for eyes and a frowning mouth. Beneath that scowling visage was another cylindrical body, also warmed by a light bulb, but this time made of wire mesh. It was perfect for climbing, but wire mother had not a cuddly angle to her. She was metallic all the way through.
There were eight baby monkeys in the study. Each was caged alone except for its surrogate mothers. The monkeys were allowed to choose their parent. Every monkey was watched over by cloth mom and wire mom. It would have been a simple preference test except for one twist. For four of the monkeys, there was a milk-bottle attached to the cloth mother. The other four had a "barren" cloth mother. It was wire mom who held the bottle. This made each monkey's choice a test of the prevailing theories of motherhood. If touch was nothing special, if the infant-mother relationship was based on food, then the bottle-holding surrogate should be chosen whenever she had the food advantage. Neither wire mom's stiff body nor cloth's mom's pillowy one should make a difference. The infant monkeys should go for the bottle-holding mother. And if they did? Well, that would have been the end of Harry Harlow's love studies.
Instead, it was clear to Harry — hell, it was clear to everyone — that being fed formed no relationship at all for these baby monkeys. The mother love study suggested that the wire mother could have been dripping with milk, standing in puddles of the stuff, and the baby monkeys wouldn't have cared for her. Cloth mom, on the other hand, was a baby monkey magnet.
Instead, it was clear to Harry — hell, it was clear to everyone — that being fed formed no relationship at all for these baby monkeys. The mother love study suggested that the wire mother could have been dripping with milk, standing in puddles of the stuff, and the baby monkeys wouldn't have cared for her. Cloth mom, on the other hand, was a baby monkey magnet.
In the published paper that followed, there are two small, neat, astonishingly clear graphs labeled "Fed on Cloth Mother" and "Fed on Wire Mother." The graphs track how much time the baby monkeys spent with each mother in a typical twenty-four-hour period. What makes the charts so remarkable is how alike they are. By the age of six months, both groups are spending pretty much all their time, about eighteen hours a day, with the cloth mom. The wire-fed monkeys hustle back to the other mother for food but they eat fast. The charts show that they spend no more than an hour a day on wire mom. Mostly the baby monkeys, each every one, are sleeping on cloth mom. Or cuddling. Or tucking their bodies close against her when they are startled. Or just stroking her. The graphs seem to have invisible writing running through them, saying that food is sustenance but a good hug is life itself.
