animal studies - harlow and Lorenz

• Lorenz

  • Tested imprinting
  • Gosling eggs were randomly divided - half were taken to an incubator and the other half were hatched naturally
  • The incubated goslings saw Lorenz first and the natural goslings saw the mother first
  • He marked the goslings and put them all in a lake
  • The incubated group followed him and the natural group followed the mother
  • stated a critical stage for imprinting to take place and stated it’s importance for mating - peackocks hatched and first thing they saw was a giant tortoise, in the future all they wanted to mate with was a giant tortoise (sexual imprinting)
• Lorenz evaluation

  • Guiton showed this could be yellow rubber gloves on his study with chicks. He later found males tried to mate with the glove later on
  • However, he later found he could reverse the imprinting of the glove on the chicks if they later spent time with their own species
  • It is believed imprinting is like every other learning - can take place rapidly and is fairly reversible
• Harlow

  • Infant monkeys removed from their biological mothers and given 2 surrogates (one made from wire and providing food, one made from cloth but doesn’t provide food)
  • spent more time with the cloth mother and clung to them when frightened
  • Continued his research on motherless monkeys as they grew up to see if maternal deprivation had an effect
  • They developed abnormally: froze or fled when approached by other monkeys, didn’t show normal mating behaviour, bred less, mothers neglected their young or killed them
  • found a critical period - 90 days
• Harlow evaluation

  • Internal validity - the wired monkeys varied in other ways (e.g their faces were different and this may be why the infants chose them)
  • Generalising animal studies to human behaviour - humans are governed by conscious decisions, animals aren’t
  • Ethics - created long lasting harm to the monkeys, they struggled to form relationships with peers
  • Knowledge of the study outweighs the costs
  • Research had helped social workers understand risk factors in child neglect and abuse to prevent it