by Alex Boese
Luella resisted the idea. Evidently she was the sensible one. But in 1931 a grant from the Social Science Research Council gave Winthrop enough money to conduct the experiment, and the Yale Anthropoid Experiment Station in Orange Park, Florida, offered him a chimp. Grudgingly, Luella agreed to go along with her husband’s plan, so they packed their bags and moved to Florida to meet their new daughter.
One other factor made the timing perfect. The Kelloggs had recently had a child of their own, a son named Donald. This presented Winthrop a unique opportunity to raise a chimp and a human side by side, allowing him to collect detailed data about the comparative rates of development of the two species.
Gua arrived at the Kellogg household on June 26, 1931. She was seven and a half months old. Donald was ten months old.
During the first meeting of the two infants, the parents hovered over them nervously, ready to intervene at the first sign of tension. But there was no need. Donald was immediately fascinated by Gua. He reached over and touched her. Initially Gua showed little corresponding interest, but by the next time they met, she had warmed up to him considerably. She leaned over and kissed him. From that moment on, the two were inseparable.
The experiment proved to be a full-time job. Not only were there the usual tasks involved with caring for infants—bathing, feeding, changing diapers—but the Kelloggs also kept themselves busy recording details of how the babies ate, slept, walked, and played. They noted unusual emotional reactions. For instance, Gua had an unaccountable fear of toadstools. They wrote down responses to smells—Donald liked perfume but Gua hated it. They even recorded what sound a spoon made when it was knocked against the infants’ heads:
The differences between the skulls can be audibly detected by tapping them with the bowl of a spoon or with some similar object. The sound made by Donald’s head during the early months is somewhat in the nature of a dull thud, while that obtained from Gua’s is harsher, like the crack of a mallet upon a wooden croquet or bowling ball.
The Kelloggs also devised tests to measure Donald’s and Gua’s abilities. For instance, the suspended-cookie test—how quickly could the infants figure out how to reach a cookie suspended by a string in the middle of the room? And the sound-localization test—with hoods over their heads, could they locate where a person calling them by name was standing? Gua reliably performed better on these tests than Donald, demonstrating that chimps mature faster than humans. So score one for the chimp.
But the Kelloggs were interested not only in Gua’s development, but also in how humanized she was becoming. Here the results were mixed. Gua picked up some human behaviors. She often walked upright, and she ate with a spoon. But in other ways she remained decidedly chimplike. She was, in the words of the Kelloggs, a creature of “violent appetites and emotions.” Simple things, such as people having changed their clothes, would confuse and frighten her. The ability to speak eluded her, despite Winthrop’s repeated efforts to make her say “Papa.” And she failed entirely to grasp the concept of pat-a-cake—a game that Donald understood right away. So score one for the human!
To be fair, Donald wasn’t proving to be much of a speaker, either. Nine months into the experiment, he had only mastered three words. Which left pat-a-cake as the sole arena in which he truly reigned victorious over the chimp. But what he did say began to worry the Kelloggs. One day, to indicate he was hungry, he imitated Gua’s “food bark.” Suddenly, visions of their son transforming into a wild child, grunting and crawling on all fours, danced before their eyes. Perhaps, the Kelloggs realized, some playmates of his own species would be better for his development. So on March 28, 1932, they shipped Gua back to the primate center. She was never heard from again.
Could Gua have been humanized had the experiment continued longer than nine months? The answer is certainly no. Primatologists now know enough about chimpanzees to state this definitively. Chimps are wild animals. Their inherent wildness eventually reasserts itself, even if they’re raised in a human family. So it’s just as well the Kelloggs ended the experiment when they did.
Unfortunately, every year people insist on learning this lesson the hard way. It’s become quite popular to purchase baby chimps as pets—even though they can cost more than forty thousand dollars. But a few years later, owners have on their hands a full-grown, enormously strong animal that requires skill and training to handle. Mature chimps can be willful, mischievous, and destructive. If they’re bored they look for trouble. They pull down drapes and knock over furniture. They’re smart enough to know the one thing a person values most in the house, and they may purposefully decide to smash it. Come to think of it, they’re not that different from a typical younger sibling. So perhaps Gua could have been a normal little sister for Donald after all.
Kellogg, W. N., & L. A. Kellogg (1933). The Ape and the Child: A Study of Environmental Influence upon Early Behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc.
Baby in a Box
The first baby was a lot of work. There was all that laundry and cleaning, and if he wasn’t careful when he bent down to lift the child out of her crib, he risked spraining his back. So in 1943, when Burrhus Frederic Skinner’s wife became pregnant for a second time, he decided to use his scientific training to reduce the drudgery of baby care. He came up with a device he called the mechanical baby tender. It became more widely known as the “baby box.”
Skinner’s psychological research had well equipped him for gadget making. Over ten years earlier, while a graduate student at Harvard, he had invented a device called an operant chamber, or Skinner Box. The box held an animal, such as a rat or a pigeon; when the animal pressed a lever, it received a reward, usually food. Skinner, an outspoken proponent of behaviorism—the school of psychology pioneered by John Watson of Little Albert fame—used this box to demonstrate that by varying the frequency of rewards, he could dramatically alter the behavior of animals, training them to do just about anything. For instance, a rat named Pliny learned that in order to make its food appear, it first had to pull a lever to make a marble drop from a chute, then pick up the glass ball and place it down a slot.
During World War II Skinner embarked on an even more ambitious project—training pigeons to guide missiles. Strapped into the nose cone, the bird would guide the bomb by pecking at a target on a screen. The weird thing was, the system actually worked—at least as well as any electronic guidance system of the time. But the idea proved too bizarre for the military, which cut funding for the project. Disheartened, Skinner focused his creative energies on building the mechanical baby tender. Compared to a pigeon-guided missile, the new project must have seemed like child’s play.
The baby tender was essentially a large box six feet high and two-and-a-half feet wide. The baby sat in a shallow pan about three feet off the ground, peering out at the world through a large safety-glass window that could be slid up and down. A heater, humidifier, and air filter circulated warm, fresh air within the chamber. Insulated walls muffled the noise of the outside world.
The unit offered many conveniences and safety advantages. The heated interior meant the baby didn’t need clothes or blankets, just a diaper. So there was less laundry. The window both protected the baby from germs and prevented her from falling out. The mattress consisted of a ten-yard-long sheet of canvas attached to rollers. When it got dirty, the parents simply rolled out a clean section. And because the device was quite tall, parents could place a baby in it without damage to their backs. All in all, the invention was very practical.
Skinner’s daughter, Deborah, became the guinea pig on whom he tested the baby tender. After nine months, she was healthy and happy. Skinner, judging his invention to be a success, decided to let the world know about it. Eschewing academic journals, he sent an article to the popular women’s magazine Ladies’ Home Journal. The editors of Ladies’ Home Journal, recognizing an entertaining oddity when they saw it, published the article—with one slight alteration. They changed Skinner’s title from “Baby C
are Can Be Modernized” to “Baby in a Box.”
Skinner always blamed this one editorial change for the public reaction that followed. No matter how much he later tried to convince people of the benefits of his invention—how much time it would save the mother and how much more comfortable it would make the baby—their reaction consistently remained the same: “You’ve put a baby in a box!” One angry reader wrote in to a local paper saying, “It is the most ridiculous, crazy invention ever heard of. Caging this baby up like an animal, just to relieve the Mother of a little more work.” An entire high school English class wrote directly to Skinner to inform him that “by creating this ‘revolutionary product,’ you have shown that you are ready to inaugurate a society composed of box-raised vegetables similar to the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley.” Another critic charitably compared the baby tender to a quick-freeze display case.
The idea that the baby tender was some kind of giant Skinner Box designed to behaviorally condition babies took root. Skinner conceded that, given the similarity between the terms Baby Box and Skinner Box, “it was natural to suppose that we were experimenting on our daughter as if she were a rat or pigeon.” But this was not the case. In fact, Deborah’s time in the baby tender was more of a trial run than an experiment. Skinner did hope to conduct a formal experiment in which he would compare ten babies raised in the baby tender to ten babies raised in normal cribs, but this study never happened.
The perception of Deborah as the unwitting subject of a human Skinner Box experiment inspired a series of urban legends that surfaced during the 1950s and ’60s. According to these rumors, as an adult Deborah became psychotic, sued her father, and committed suicide. In reality, Deborah grew up quite normal and became a successful London-based artist. Though intriguingly, as art critics have noted, her paintings “appear to represent visions seen through ‘glass prisms’—perhaps reflections reminiscent of infant window views.”
Not all reactions to the baby tender were negative. A small community of enthusiasts embraced the concept. But in the words of one General Mills engineer whom Skinner approached about producing a commercial version of the device, these supporters tended to be “long-haired people and cold-hearted scientists.” This wasn’t a demographic General Mills was interested in selling to.
Skinner eventually worked out a manufacturing deal with a Cleveland businessman, J. Weston Judd, who had the inspired idea of marketing the baby tenders as “Heir Conditioners.” But Judd turned out to be a con artist who failed to deliver any product and then skipped town with five hundred dollars Skinner had loaned him. In the 1950s an engineer, John Gray, next took up the thankless job of selling baby tenders. He came up with a better name—Air Crib—and actually sold a few hundred units. But when Gray died in 1967, the Air Crib industry died with him. Unless you strike it lucky on eBay, you’ll be hard-pressed to get your hands on an Air Crib today.
Ultimately the baby tender was a decent (or, at least, harmless) idea that suffered from a serious image problem. As proof of the basic soundness of the concept, Skinner’s advocates point to the hundreds of healthy, sane people who were raised in the devices. But the public remained uncomfortable with the notion of enclosing a child in a box. Perhaps people simply were concerned that, in such a highly engineered environment, a kid would grow up too square.
Skinner, B. F. (October 1945). “Baby in a Box.” Ladies’ Home Journal: 30–31, 135–136, 138.
The New Mother
“If you continue to be naughty I shall have to go away, and leave you and send home a new mother with glass eyes and a wooden tail.”
So an exasperated mother warns her children in Lucy Clifford’s short story “The New Mother,” first published in 1882. As Clifford was a writer of dark, gothic fairy tales, her readers knew what to expect. The children keep misbehaving, until the mother sadly packs her bags and departs. Hours later the new mother arrives, announcing her presence with a terrible knocking on the door. The frightened children peer out the window and see her long bony arms and the flashing of her two glass eyes. Then with a blow of her wooden tail, the new mother smashes down the door. Shrieking with terror, the children flee into the forest, where they spend the rest of their lives sleeping on the ground among dead leaves and feeding on wild blackberries, never to return home. That’s what they get for being naughty.
Clifford’s story sends chills down readers’ spines today, over a century after it was written, because it taps into such primal emotions. It takes the image of the mother—the ultimate symbol of love and security—and transforms it into a mechanical terror. The same juxtaposition is what made Harry Harlow’s cloth-mother experiments such a sensation when he conducted them in the 1950s, and why they continue to fascinate the public today.
Harlow was a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin. He was interested in the nature of love, specifically the love of an infant for its mother. The prevailing psychological wisdom was that love was an overrated and certainly unscientific concept. Psychologists dismissively explained that an infant wanted to be close to its mother simply because she provided milk. That’s all love was—an effort to reduce hunger pangs. The same John Watson who terrified Little Albert even warned parents that too much cuddling could warp children’s characters, making them whiny and fearful.
Harlow thought this was hogwash. He was sure love was about more than hunger. While raising infant rhesus monkeys at his lab, Harlow had noticed that the tiny primates craved—and seemed to draw strength from—physical contact with their mothers. If separated from their mothers, they would bond with substitutes, lovingly embracing the soft cloth rags used to line the bottom of their cages, in the same way human children become attached to cuddly toy animals and dolls. It seemed to be a drive as strong as hunger.
Harlow decided to test the claim that love is just a desire for milk. He separated infant monkeys from their mothers at birth and put them in a cage with two surrogate mothers of his own design. He called the first surrogate “cloth mother.” She was a block of wood wrapped in rubber, sponge, and terry cloth and warmed by a lightbulb. She was, Harlow enthused, “a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or bit her baby in anger.” However, she provided no milk. All she could offer was a warm, soft surface to cuddle against.
The second surrogate was a “wire-mesh mother.” Her steel-wire frame wasn’t cuddly at all, but she did supply milk.
Would the infants go for cuddles or for food? Harlow carefully recorded the amount of time the babies spent with each mother, but it soon became apparent that, in the eyes of the monkeys, there was no doubt which mother was better. They spent almost all their time snuggling with cloth mother, only suckling at wire-mesh mother’s teat for a few brief seconds before frantically running back to the security of cloth mother. Clearly, these babies cared more about cuddling than about nourishment.
This experiment demolished in one fell swoop decades of psychological dogma. But Harlow wasn’t finished.
Although the infants clung desperately to cloth mother, she clearly wasn’t a great parent. Her babies grew up strange—timid and antisocial. They cowered in corners and shrieked as people walked by. Other monkeys shunned them. Wire-mesh-mothered monkeys fared even worse. Harlow realized his surrogate mothers still lacked essential features. He set out to determine scientifically what these might be. What were the significant variables in the relationship between a child and its mother?
He began with texture. He wrapped his surrogate mothers in different materials—terry cloth, rayon, vinyl (which he called the “linoleum lover”), and rough-grade sandpaper. The infants definitely preferred the terry cloth mother and showed more self-confidence in her presence. So Harlow concluded that a good mother must be soft.
Next he investigated temperature. He created “hot mamma” and “cold mamma.” Hot mamma had heated coils in her body that raised her temper
ature. Chilled tubes of water ran through cold mamma. As far as the monkeys were concerned, cold mamma might as well have been dead. They avoided her at all costs. Conclusion—a good mother must be warm.
Finally, Harlow examined motion. Real mothers are always walking around or swinging from trees. To simulate this, he came up with “swinging mom.” Swinging mom, hung from a frame like a punching bag, dangled two inches off the floor. Harlow quipped, “There is nothing original in this day and age about a swinger becoming a mother, and the only new angle, if any, is a mother becoming a swinger.” Surprisingly, the monkeys loved swinging mom best of all. And under her care, they grew up to be remarkably well adjusted—or as well adjusted as could be expected for a child who has a swinging cloth bag for a mother. So the final tally was that good mothers must be soft, be warm, and move.
William Mason, who worked for a while in Harlow’s lab after obtaining his Ph.D. from Stanford, later extended this work and came up with the perfect surrogate mother for a baby monkey. She fit all the criteria. She was soft and warm, and moved. She also happened to be a mongrel dog. Mason’s dog-raised monkeys turned out strikingly normal. They were bright, alert, and happy little creatures, though perhaps slightly confused about their identity. Remarkably, the dogs didn’t seem to mind the little monkeys hanging off them.