Animal studies

• Procedure


  1. Lorenz randomly divided 12 goose eggs, half hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment and the other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz

  2. Lorenz mixed all goslings together to see whom they would follow

  3. Lorenz also observed birds and their later courtship behaviour
• Procedure


  1. Harry Harlow reared 16 rhesus monkeys with two wire model mothers

  2. In one condition, milk was dispensed by the plain wire 'mother'

  3. In a second condition, it was dispensed by the cloth-covered 'mothers'

  4. Harlow measured the monkeys' preferences

  5. Harlow placed the monkeys in novel situations with novel objects and added a noisemaking teddy bear to the environment

  6. Harlow and his colleagues also continued to study the monkeys who had been deprived of their 'real' mother into adulthood
• One imitation is generalising findings and conclusions from birds to humans
• The mammalian attachment system is quite different from that in birds
• Mammalian mothers show more emotional attachment to their young
• It is not appropriate to generalise Lorenz's ideas about emotional attachment to humans
• Imprinting


  • Young animals are born with an innate mechanism to imprint on a moving object present in the critical window of development
• Guiton (1966) study


  • Chicks imprinted on yellow washing up gloves and tried to mate with them as adults
• With experience, the chickens learned to mate with their own kind
• The effects of imprinting are not as long-lasting as Lorenz believed
• Harlow's research


  • Has important practical applications
  • Helped social workers understand risk factors in child abuse and intervene to prevent it
  • Understood the importance of attachment figures for baby monkeys in zoos and breeding programmes
• Harlow faced severe criticism for the ethics of his research
• Rhesus monkeys are similar enough to humans for us to generalise findings, which also means their suffering was presumably human-like
• Harlow was aware of the suffering caused and referred to the wire mothers as 'iron maidens'
• The counter-argument is that Harlow's research was sufficiently important to justify the procedures
• Although monkeys are clearly more similar to humans than Lorenz's geese, they are not humans
• Human babies develop speech-like communication (babbling) which may influence the formation of attachments
• Psychologists disagree on the extent to which studies of non-human primates can be generalised to humans