A study or paper · 1958 ·
The mother that fed and the mother that held
Infant rhesus monkeys were given a choice of two surrogate mothers, one of which supplied milk and one of which did not, and spent their time with the one that gave less.
It is the best available evidence that attachment is not a response to being fed, because the experiment separated the two and the animals chose warmth over milk. What makes it belong on this site rather than in a psychology textbook is the direction of the attachment: the chosen figure could not reciprocate at all, gave no sign of recognising what it was for, and did nothing back - and it was preferred over the alternative that actually sustained it. That is the same structure as every entry here, with an animal on the far end instead of a person. Harlow's monkeys also ended up without the elementary social skills that the cloth mother could not teach, which is the other half of the finding: a bond that works perfectly and reciprocates nothing is still not sufficient.
Where it sits
1950 1950-1999 · 1958 1999
Provenance · 2 source record(s)
- retrievableInfant monkeys preferred a nonfeeding soft cloth mother providing physical comfort and warmth over a wire mother providing only milk; contact comfort is 'a variable of overwhelming importance in the development of affectional responses, whereas lactation is a variable of negligible importance'.Harlow, H. F. (1958). The nature of love. American Psychologist, 13(12), 673-685. ↗
- retrievableMonkeys reared by surrogate mothers lacked elementary social skills, and the interpretations drawn by Bowlby and Bettelheim from the same observations differed sharply.Levinson, M. H. (2023). The nature of love: Harlow, Bowlby and Bettelheim on affectionless mothers. History of the Human Sciences, 1. ↗
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