“Monkey Love”
During 1930s, Harry Harlow, the American psychologist, started a series of experiments by using infant monkeys. The experiments were supposed to study monkeys’ cognitive progress in a fake environment, where there were two kinds of fake mothers. One was a wired one that produced milk, the other one, soft-cloth-covered without milk. The whole experiment was based on his curiosity regarding the probable connection between love, touch, dependency, socializing, and cognitive/emotional progress. Simply said, he wanted to know what preferences the infant monkeys had, milk/nutrition or warmth/comfort.
The procedure started by separating infants from their mothers, which caused an immense emotional distress among poor monkeys. The infants…show more content… His claim was that the mother is more than a feeding machine. She gives protection, comfort, emotional stability, and love, which are far more important than only to feed the baby. Nature versus nurture.
Harlow’s different long term experiments with infant monkeys resulted only in chaos in the end, which eventually created psycho monkeys with totally disturbed emotional/mental condition. None of his experiments ended up the way he was hoping, and just created big disappointment to the mental science group members.
In my opinion, Harry Harlow was a self-centered person who by torturing innocent monkeys was trying to prove a psychological idea, and gain fame/acknowledgment. The pathetic part of his efforts was to prove the importance of love/affection, without having/knowing such feelings himself. His claim was that how importantly love, touch, and affection play a role in child development, which I think most parents, especially mothers know about that, and act on it by instinct. The most disgusting part to me was that not only his experimental failure didn't stop him from doing such cruel experiments, but he continued them in a different sadistic way which ended in a disaster by making the poor monkeys totally