the man who tortured monkeys "for science" 🐒
Harlow gave baby monkeys wire and cloth. Can you do better? Toggle parts on and off to build your creation, then rate it.
Harry Frederick Harlow (1905–1981) was an American psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He wanted to study love. Yes, love. So naturally, he decided the best way to understand maternal bonding was to rip baby monkeys away from their mothers and see what happens.
Spoiler alert: nothing good happened. The monkeys suffered immensely. Harlow knew it. He kept going anyway. For decades.
Harlow literally named one of his devices "The Pit of Despair". When you're naming your lab equipment like a medieval torture dungeon, maybe take a step back and reconsider your life choices.
Harlow took newborn monkeys from their mothers and gave them two fake "mums" to choose from:
A bare wire frame with a feeding bottle attached. Cold. Hard. Metal. Provided milk but zero comfort. Imagine trying to hug a shopping trolley.
Same wire frame but wrapped in soft terrycloth. No food, just something vaguely huggable. The baby monkeys clung to this one desperately, only visiting Wire Mother when starving.
The "breakthrough" finding: Baby monkeys preferred comfort over food. They'd rather starve while hugging a fake cloth mum than eat from an unhuggable wire one.
Cool conclusion, Harry. You know who else could have told you babies need comfort? Literally any parent who has ever existed.
Not satisfied with merely separating babies from their mothers, Harlow built what he — without a shred of irony — called "The Pit of Despair".
It was a stainless steel chamber shaped like an inverted pyramid. Baby monkeys were placed inside, alone, for up to a full year. They couldn't see out. They couldn't interact with anything. They just... existed. In despair. In a pit.
The monkeys emerged from isolation profoundly disturbed. They rocked back and forth, refused to eat, couldn't socialise, and showed signs of severe depression. Some never recovered. Harlow's own colleagues called it "extraordinarily cruel."
Harlow wasn't done. After isolating monkeys until they were psychologically shattered, he wanted to see if they could be "rehabilitated." Spoiler: he didn't try therapy or gentle reintroduction.
A cloth surrogate rigged to suddenly blast the baby with compressed air, stab it with hidden brass spikes, or violently shake it off. The babies kept coming back to cling to it anyway.
Babies could see and hear other monkeys but never touch them. Like putting a child in a glass box at a playground. For months.
Isolated females wouldn't mate naturally (wonder why), so Harlow built a restraining device he called the "rape rack" — his words, not ours — to forcibly breed them. The resulting mothers were violently abusive to their babies.
Defenders say Harlow's work proved that love and physical comfort are essential for development — influencing childcare, adoption policy, and our understanding of attachment.
But here's the thing: we already kind of knew that. Orphanage studies in the 1940s had already documented the devastating effects of emotional deprivation in human children. John Bowlby was already developing attachment theory from clinical observation.
Harlow didn't discover that babies need love. He just proved it in the most horrifying way possible, creating generations of traumatised monkeys to confirm what nursery workers and parents had known for centuries.
Man spends 30 years torturing baby monkeys to prove that babies need their mums. Could have just asked literally anyone with a baby. Gets a national medal for it. 🏅