Hi Chris, I am looking for an actual error that was made in the experiment conducted by Harry Harlow with the infant rhesus monkeys and the wire terry clothed mothers. My professor said that there is an error that was made during the experiment and I have been unable to locate it. Anything you have on this matter would be a great help. Thanks!!

-- ReAnna Merritt (flowerpower2282@comcast.net), July 15, 2004

Answers

Hi ReAnna, Since no one has answered your question yet, I thought I would make some guesses without doing a detailed reading of the study. All studies have "errors" in the sense that variables can not be completely controlled as designed, and designs can not take into account all possibilities in one or even several experiments. This is one reason that replications are some important and often illuminating. One common design problem consists of confounding independent variables, where more than one independent variable is manipulated at a time and if there is an effect,it is difficult to tell which variable is having an effect. Now back to Harlow's experiment. One question I have is whether the temperature of the experimental room was cold enough to make the wire mother less attractive. If that was the case, than "tactile comfort" may have been confounded with temperature (both leading to the infant choosing the cloth mother when not feeding). I also wonder if the wire mother was lacking in any other "instinctive" mother characterists (e.g., visual, olfactory, or even auditory) that naturally attact infants to their mothers. I hope this helps or some one else more familiar with the study will contribute an answer. Maybe you can try to design a *set* of experiments to *systemically replicate* Harlow's experiment. Often it takes such a series of related (but different) experiments to feel confident that most of the major possible causes have been examined. Paul

-- Paul Kleinginna (pkleinginna@georgiasouthern.edu), July 19, 2004.

I'm doing a report on Harry Harlow for my psychology class and I have to contradict Paul. Both "surrogate" mothers had an electric light placed inside them so there couldn't have been a problem with temperature. I think that the major error was that the monkeys used for the experiment had severe psychological problems later in life. Harlow continued to study the rhesus monkeys and found that many years without a real mother caused the monkey to have mental problems (i.e., grabbing and clutching itself, rocking back and forth).

-- Morgan (crazypoet314@yahoo.com), September 23, 2004.