The Homogenous Monkeys: The Surrogate Mother

The aim of this experiment was to examine whether mothers were most important for their providence of food or for the emotional comfort that a young child seeks during the social and mental stages of development, and the impacts of separating a young child from their birth mother.
This experiment was conducted by Harry Harlow in 1971. He began by obtaining rhesus monkeys that had been separated from their mothers at birth. Harlow placed these monkeys in isolated cages. Each cage contained a wire surrogate mother that provided food and a cloth surrogate mother that did not provide food. An overwhelming majority of the monkeys went to the cloth surrogate mother for comfort, only visiting the wire monkey for nourishment. After observing the monkeys for a while, Harlow was able to conclude that the monkeys spent the majority of the time with the cloth surrogate mother. After this step, Harlow tried scaring the monkeys to see which mother they would seek comfort from and most chose the cloth mother to cling to, rather than the wire mother. After the experiment, when the isolated monkeys were encouraged to socialize with others, many of them were timid or overly aggressive towards the others. This experiment was able to prove that …show more content…
This experiment violated a large number of ethical guidelines and would not be allowed today. First, the experiment subjected the rhesus monkeys to harm. This violated the guideline Caring of Animals 11.46, as animals should not be harmed in any way during an experiment. Furthermore, once the experiment was finished, no effort was made to help the monkey’s gain the social skills that would have been obtained without the experiment’s interference. This violated the guideline Offset/Correct Harm 11.44 as any harm caused by the experiment should be debriefed in a way that would allow for