Thoughts on Harry Harlow

The Four Corners show ‘Monkey Love’ on Monday night left me thinking again about the issue of animal rights and welfare. The program focused on the work of the American research psychologist, Harry Harlow, who performed controversial experiments on rhesus monkeys in an animal laboratory. Because monkeys could experience the emotions that humans feel, Harlow believed we could better understand how to raise human children by looking at how baby monkeys responded to alternative approaches to upbringing – this was superior to insights based on ‘rat-driven’ psychology since rats did not have these human capabilities.

Early experiments involved separating infant monkeys from their mother and providing surrogate ‘wire’ or ‘soft-cloth’ mothers. The infants preferred the soft-cloth mothers even though the wire mothers had the food supply. Harlow concluded that infants need ‘contact comfort’ as well as milk. He also experimented by placing baby monkeys in new or even frightening environments – those monkeys with a ‘soft cloth’ mother adapted better to such environments and having this sense of security even emboldened them to explore such environments.

Harlow’s work was useful in suggesting to human parents that physical contact (‘hugging’, ‘security’) were as important as providing food. It also promoted the role of motherhood and maternal love and nurturing. These precepts seem obvious today but this was not so in the 1940s and 1950s where the conventional wisdom was not to turn infants (particularly male infants) into ‘sooks’ or ‘sissies’ by comforting them if they cried or were unhappy. The experiments carried by Harlow to demonstrate these points clearly had damaging psychological and social consequences for the young monkeys – they seemed callously cruel - but there was a social payoff for humans in terms of better understanding the upbringing of children. .

But as Harlow continued his work he himself became subject to person problems. His first marriage collapsed and he became an alcoholic. He suffered depression, extreme 'status anxiety' and embarked on a new series of almost sinister experiments. The Four Corners program notes summarise the main idea:

‘On Harlow’s ‘Rape Rack’, disturbed female monkeys were forced to breed against their will. In his ‘Pit of Despair’, baby monkeys were left in total darkness for up to two years. With his ‘Iron Maiden’, infant monkeys were drawn to a placid surrogate mother that began suddenly to tear at their flesh.

Why? Bizarrely, it was all done in the name of love. Harlow was on a quest to understand the nature of love, especially the unique bond between mother and baby. Harlow believed that to understand the heart, he first had to break it.

Harlow’s defenders say that he brought love into science, and warmth into the way we parent our children; and that he influenced crucial policies that operate in today’s child welfare and birthing sectors.

But did he have to go to such extremes with his experiments? What are the limits to a scientist’s right to hurt animals? Was the animals’ suffering worth the knowledge we gained about raising children today?’

Harlow at times seemed almost to hate the animals he was experimenting on. ‘The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. 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?’ Indeed Harlow’s bizarre later experiments, that explored the depths of depression in animals by ‘breaking their hearts’, occurred while Harlow himself was severely depressed. One positive feature of these ghastly experiments is that they led to the animal liberation movement in the US and to thinking of ethical issues involved in human interactions with animals.

These ethical issues remind me of classical paradoxes in utilitarianism. Assuming that primates do experience pain in the way that humans do and that they have moral rights to be protected from the deliberate inflicting of pain, is it reasonable to make them suffer so that humans can derive what is claimed to be a great benefit? Primates are selected for these experiments because they react as humans might – they feel the same types of physical and emotional pains as humans.

From the viewpoint of pain and suffering inflicted, it is impossible morally to distinguish the case for using primates in such experiments rather than humans. Putting it even more starkly the moral problem here is close to the ‘ticking bomb’ problem – do humans have the right to torture a small group of humans to provide information that will provide great benefits such as preventing mass deaths due to a terrorist attack?

I was disturbed by Harry Harlow’s experiments though I recognise that child-rearers learnt a lot from them. I am not convinced that many of the insights were not rather obvious – that social animals, like monkeys, become psychotic when placed in a ‘pit of despair’ for two years is unsurprising. I also just empathise with the sufferings of these sentient beings. I am also disturbed by the bland approach that some psychologists take to the work of Harlow – consider this or this for example.

Finally, I was interested in the portrayal of Harlow as an aggressive, entrepreneurial, academic who was embarrassed by his own Jewish-sounding name and so changed it (he wasn’t Jewish). While preaching the value of motherhood and the love of children, he showed very little of it to his own children. His hatred of feminists and animal rights supporters became pathological and his collapse into alcoholism, depression and Parkinson’s Disease was a tragic conclusion to a strained and difficult life. His biography is Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection. I ordered it today.