Harlow's Experiment: The Bond Between Mother And Child

Harlow 's experiment showed that young mammals get attached to their milk givers, while Behaviorist believe that mother child bond doesn 't need to derive from milk, rather children are born with natural tendency to stay close to attachment figure like mother. I will argue how Harlow’s wire and cloth mother experiments refute the behaviorist account of the mother - child bond because the attachment of mother and child is so important for the survival of the child that their bonding doesn’t just build from milk rather from trust.

Behaviorist only study behavior without reference to mental processes. Behaviorism is “the theory that human and animal behavior can be explained in terms of conditioning, without appeal to thoughts or feelings, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior patterns” (Myers and Dewall 282). It describes how all learning and behaviors are directly correlated with environmental stimuli. The behaviorist believed that the basic laws of learning are the same for all species, including humans. There are many forms of learning like associative learning, classical conditioning, and cognitive learning. Environment is part of many learning process, for instance, in Ivan …show more content…
Behaviorist theory of attachment suggest that attachment is a set of learned behaviors. The basis for the learning of attachments is the provision of food. An infant will initially form an attachment to whoever feeds it. But this wasn’t the case in Harlow 's experiment because the monkeys didn’t get attached to the wire mother which provide milk just like cloth mother did. Baby monkeys were attached to cloth mother because not only it gave them milk but provided comfort as