Harry Harlow

Harry Harlow (1905-1981) was an American psychologist best known for his studies on affection and development using rhesus monkeys and surrogate wire or terrycloth mothers. Born Harry Israel on Halloween night, he changed his name to Harry Harlow in 1930. He earned his BA and Ph.D. from Stanford University, and did his research primarily at the University of Wisconsin where he worked for a time with humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow.

In his most famous experiment, Harlow offered young rhesus monkeys a choice between two surrogate mothers. The terrycloth mother provided no food and wire mother provided food. The young monkeys spent as little time as possible with the mother providing food and otherwise clung to the terrycloth mother. Apparently the terrycloth mothers provided something that was more valuable to the young monkeys than food. Harlow's interpretation - which is still prevalent today - was that the preference for the terrycloth mother demonstrated the importance of affection and emotional nurturance in mother-child relationships. These findings contradicted both the then common pedagogic advice of limiting or avoiding bodily contact in an attempt to avoid spoiling especially male children and the insistence of the then dominant behaviorist school of psychology that emotions were negligible. Harlow himself described his experiments as a study of love.

He was also well-known for refusing to use euphemisms and instead chose deliberately outrageous terms for the experimental apparatus he devised, including a forced mating device he called a "rape rack", tormenting surrogate mother devices he called "iron maidens" and an isolation chamber he called the "pit of despair." In the latter of these devices, alternatively called the "well of despair", baby monkeys would be hung upside-down in darkness for a period of up to two years. This procedure produced monkeys that were severely psychologically disturbed and themselves unable to raise children.

While many of his experiments would be considered unethical today, their nature and Harlow's descriptions of them heightened awareness of the treatment of laboratory animals and thus paradoxically contributed somewhat to today's ethics regulations.

In 1958, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association, at which time he presented his seminal paper, The Nature of Love.

Harlow's lab was known as "Goon Park" because of its location at 600 N. Park St. (a hastily written "6" often resembled a "G"), hence the title of the biography by Deborah Blum: Love At Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection (2002) ISBN 0425194051, ISBN 0470850728

He was known to his students at the University of Wisconsin as "Monkey Man". (Source: student at University of Wisconsin, David Michael Miller, 1957-1959.