Sarah Palmer

Harry Harlow wanted to find the importance of love. He learned it by messing with baby monkeys' heads. Harlow separated baby monkeys from their mothers almost as soon as they were born. He raised them in labs with two kinds of surrogate monkey mother machines that could both give milk. The monkey almost always chose the mother made of cloth and not the one made from bare wire.

Hopefully, there are educational, adorable clips of some of the nicer experiments here:





Later he raised monkeys exclusively with one mother. The ones with the cloth mother grew to be typical monkeys. The ones with the wire mothers didn't develop coping mechanisms, acting erratically, and were generally less well adjusted. Later experiments tested the effects of a mother's cruelty on her children. They don't end that well.

Harlow concluded that we need more than just sustenance to grow into mature, stable people; we need physical comfort and a feeling of being protected. Essentially, he argued we need love and touch to grow. It seems kind of obvious, but during the 50s when these experiments were going on people who worked with babies avoiding touching them because that was supposed to make them more unhealthy. Scientists told mothers that touching their children too much could turn them gay. At the time, the findings that touch was good were ground-breaking.