Animal Studies

Animal Studies

1. Harlow's Monkey Studies

   • Two types of 'comfort monkeys', one wire and one wire with cloth
   • Monkeys preferred the cloth monkey over the wire monkey even if the wire had food
     • Contact Comfort
   • 16 monkeys
   • One condition where the wire monkey dispensed milk and the other condition where the cloth monkey dispensed milk
   • The monkeys which participated were maternally deprived when released into the wild, the wire-only were the worse of the two
     • More aggressive and bred less often than 'normal' monkeys
   • Harlow went on to say that monkeys had 90 days (critical period) to get a mother figure

2. Lorenz's Geese Study

   • Randomly divided up goose eggs and hatched some in incubator and some with a mother goose, first thing incubator geese saw was Lorenz
   • Even when the two groups were mixed, the control group followed the mother and the experimental group followed Lorenz
     • This is called imprinting
   • Critical period in which imprinting needs to occur either at birth or within a couple of hours depending on the bird species
     • If it does not happen then chicks did not attach them to a mother figure
   • Observed that birds that imprint on humans display courtship behaviour towards humans
   • Peacock in 1952 saw a giant tortoise first and displayed courtship behaviour towards them

3. Evaluation

   • Bird imprinting is different to humans and mammals so cannot generalise Lorenz's studies to humans
   • Guiton (1966) found that chicks that imprint on yellow washing up gloves would display courtship but that experience led them to prefer mating with other chickens
   • Harlow showed how babies don't just want food and relationships for babies aren't cupboard love and the relationship forms a schema for future relationships
   • Harlow's researche shows the importance to social workers about neglect and abuse so they can intervene, also it helps with captive monkeys so we can take care of them properly
   • However, the monkeys suffered heavily due to Harlow's research which means it is not very ethical
     • Monkeys are similar to humans which increases validity of research and the research was good enough to say it was worth it