Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

by Deborah Blum

  Clara was small, warm, and exuberant, “like a pet kitten,” her mother said. “One did not readily associate sorrow with her.” She had big brown eyes in a round face, a quick crisp voice, and a chuckle like a tumbling brook. She was born July 8, 1909, in Reno, Nevada, and was fourteen when both she and her older brother, Leon, were recruited into the gifted project. Clara was the youngest of five children in the Mears family and ever the most confident. Her mother described her on Terman’s questionnaire as follows: Clara started reading at age four. She progressed to poetry at age five and her favorite author that year was seventeenth century poet, William Blake. By age eleven, she still liked British poets but had moved into the nineteenth century and now preferred Robert Browning. Reading was her favorite hobby, period. But her talents weren’t limited to the literary. By the time she was a Browning fan, she was also doing her older sisters’ algebra work for them.

  Her mother’s only complaint was that Clara was so indifferent to domestic chores. “She reasons someone else into it if possible. She says she will live by her brains instead of handwork.” Clara liked to cook if it was creative enough. But housework, mending, the average Sunday dinner? It bored her bright daughter right out of the house. “She plans to hire someone to do that,” Ernestine Mears wrote mournfully.

  The ambitious scholar graduated from high school at the age of fifteen. She went on to a private women’s school in the San Francisco bay area, Mill’s College. There Clara began to appreciate her own abilities. “Dearests,” she wrote to her parents in 1928, to tell them that she had outscored her entire class on an aptitude test. “Isn’t that quite astonishing? Of course, from the natural run of events I’ve always known I could go faster than average, but I didn’t know quite where I was.” She decided to go on to graduate school. In 1930—the same year that Harry joined the faculty—the University of Wisconsin offered her a research assistantship in psychology. One of her first classes was Harry Harlow’s graduate seminar on emotions. She liked it—or perhaps him—enough that she signed up for his next course, an evening seminar in physiological psychology. “When I began making A’s in physiological psychology, Harry Harlow began escorting me home,” she said.

  Clara’s outgoing friendliness coaxed Harry out of his natural shyness. They went to parties together, shared dinners. They played tennis and bridge and squash with fierce competitiveness. Clara, even more than Harry, loathed losing. “She does not like to be beaten in games but Harry is laughing her out of that,” her mother wrote. And Clara, herself, made a happy confession to Terman. With Harry, she felt she could just be herself. He was a man “who admires accomplishment but never demands it or suggests or overrates it instead of a father whose influence was always toward the peak.” With Harry, she had a sudden rush of pleasure in being liked just as she was. Her parents saw a kind of visible happiness. “There’s a peculiar gleam or shine or radiance from her eyes. Our oldest girl was a beauty, but Clara exceeds her by now by far,” Mrs. Mears wrote happily to Terman.

  Harry Harlow and Clara Mears married May 7, 1932, in Milwaukee. Terman fired off a congratulatory letter, telling the newlyweds that he rejoiced in the marriage of Clara’s “splendid hereditary equipment” to “one of the most productive young psychologists in America.” In fact, married life would have started off as almost pure celebration if not for the University of Wisconsin.

  Like most institutions at that time, the university had an inflexible nepotism policy. It did not allow spousal hires. As written, this policy might sound neutral. In practice, it wasn’t. In the 1930s, the faculty was almost entirely male. This meant that it was usually wives, not husbands, who were kept out. It didn’t matter that Clara was a promising psychologist, that even the famed Lewis Terman thought her exceptionally smart. Clara’s advisor recommended that she drop out of her Ph.D. program. It would be a waste of time to continue, she was told, because Harry would always be the first choice for a job in psychology. Many years later, Clara would still bubble with resentment. She lost her career in psychology and, eventually, she lost her sense that she and Harry were intellectual equals. She thought Harry felt the same. It would take her a long time to regain faith in herself—or in their relationship.

  But at the time? She was happy anyway; they were in love, and she was resigned. She took a job as a sales clerk in the dress department of one of Madison’s department stores, an elegant, locally owned company called Harry F. Manchester. Here, indeed, Clara lived up to Terman’s assessment of her abilities. Within six months, she was the store’s chief dress buyer. She liked stylish clothes and enjoyed telling people how to dress. She liked the salary; it allowed her to be generous. She sent some of her paycheck home to her parents every month. Retired ministers, it seemed, didn’t always have the spending money that dress buyers did. On one of Terman’s surveys, Clara said that her favorite personal quality was “a sense of humor.... I can’t take troubles too seriously but I do face them.” She was determined to make the best of her unexpected career change. She studied fashions, made herself a model of perfect grooming (she described her least favorite personal attribute as her own relentless perfectionism).

  Still, Clara wrote cheerfully to Terman, “There were few good academic possibilities with my husband a professor. Now I find business more exciting, with the varied contacts and demands.” And Terman wrote back, perfectly reflecting the attitudes toward working women at the time: “I thoroughly approve of such careers for wives. Only I hope some time that you can take a vacation and start a family. You see I am already looking forward to the enlargement of our gifted group.”

  For Harry, the dilemma was not giving up a career in psychology; the dilemma was getting one started. The university had provided him with an office. The department had cast him into the undergraduate teaching pit. It had not provided him with a research laboratory or any kind of funding for research. At Stanford, he had been told there would be a rat laboratory. But when he asked about the facilities, his department head told him that they’d decided to tear the lab down. There was no plan—whatsoever—to replace it. He was stranded. He was an experimental psychologist with no way to conduct experiments. He was a researcher with nothing to study. He was an animal psychologist without rats; at that moment he could be compared to an astronomer without a telescope, a marine biologist with only a jar of distilled water to study.

  Later in his life, Harry enjoyed making wisecracks about studying rats, or, as he liked to call it, rodentology. He made lots of them. At the time, though, he saw nothing funny in the vanished rat lab. Rat research was all he knew. Rats were the gold standard of behavioral research. There was the occasional rabbit, guinea pig, dog, or cat, sure. For credible experiments, though, the profession had adopted the rat, the rat, and nothing but the rat. In fact, by some standards of the day, if you couldn’t study rat behavior, you had little to say about human behavior.

  By 1939, when Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport—a stately, white-haired radical if there ever was one—became president of the American Psychological Association, rats simply ruled. Allport recalled being approached by a passionate behaviorist, a follower of John B. Watson, who challenged him to name one psychological question that could not be solved by using rats as subjects. Allport described himself as so taken aback that it took him a moment to think of one. Finally, and even then tentatively, he suggested “reading disabilities?”

  Allport acknowledged that rat research had “delightful suitability” for the practice of objective science; yet, he argued, objectivity didn’t always mean reality. He wasn’t convinced that you could treat human behavior with the “sterilized” approach of physical science. People were complicated and reliance on rats tended to make them look simple: “I thought of how men build clavichords and cathedrals, how they write books and how they laugh uproariously at Mickey Mouse,” Allport said in his presidential address. “Could the study of rats explain this?”

  It’s easy, from our vantage point, to wonder how psychologis
ts could believe that rat behavior completely explained human behavior. Or vice versa. The answer belongs to the same process that led the scientists to argue that love wasn’t credible. Both come, at least partly, from that overwhelming, early twentieth century drive to make psychology a real science. In their efforts to purify psychology—to give it what Allport called the sterility of physics—leaders in the field tended to dismiss behavior that couldn’t be measured and quantified.

  How do you measure love in a rat? If psychologists were to strictly control conditions, they needed lab animals that they could manipulate and test in precise designs. They might want many animals or few. Blinded animals compared to those with sight. Infants compared to adults. Rats could be acquired in almost infinite supply, their every hesitation timed, their every reaction checked, their every heartbeat counted. The problem, of course, is interpreting the beat of a heart. Allport’s contention was that his colleagues avoided that problem. They chose instead to suggest that all behaviors—human or rodent—could be simplified to stimulus-response situations. That meant that the rat could be a strong model for humans across most conditions—barring, perhaps, reading disabilities. In Watson’s words: “The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.”

  Even today, with all the aids and artistry of neurochemistry, molecular biology, and imaging technology, scientists will still refer to the brain as a black box. Beautifully complex, amazingly flexible, sometimes transparent, sometimes completely opaque. In the early twentieth century, without such technical wizardry, the box seemed filled with impenetrable darkness.

  Watson worried that he couldn’t find even four psychologists who could agree on what an internal sensation was—much less the mechanisms behind it. The founder of the Journal of American Psychology, Clark University’s G. Stanley Hall, printed a tirade on the amateurish nature of psychology in the late nineteenth century. Hall, who would later become Lewis Terman’s major professor, wanted more of the precise science that was exemplified—he thought—by his own work on raising children. The papers submitted to his journal just exasperated him. Far too many were purported studies of spirit life, dream signs, and prophecies that were “thought by their authors to be psychological.” Instead, he complained, the papers were “utterly uncritical” and unworthy. “The Journal can print only the most exact and scientifically important researchers.”

  By the time John Watson became a professor at Johns Hopkins University, in 1909, he had come to fear that American psychology was becoming a profession of scientific speculators who made educated guesses about that black box but generated no real data. Watson wanted hard facts and testable hypotheses. He turned, in desperation, to Russian psychology. The Russians, also frustrated by the unyielding brain, had decided to make it simple. One of the hottest books in Russian psychology during the late nineteenth century was titled Reflexes of the Brain. Its author, I. M. Sechenev, proposed that thought itself might be part of a physical reflex and that the brain was no more than a twitchy, responsive muscle. Sechenev’s pragmatic approach to intellect fostered an even more pragmatic generation of young Russian researchers. The most famous of those was a lapsed seminary student named Ivan Petrovich Pavlov.

  Pavlov loved research. He once wrote an essay for his students telling them that “science demands of a man his whole life. And, even if you could have two lives, they would not be sufficient.” He had begun his career with a meticulous exploration of digestion, illuminating the mechanics so clearly that he would receive a 1904 Nobel Prize for those studies. His best-known work followed logically from there. His digestion studies were performed in dogs. Pavlov noticed that his animals drooled not only when they were near food but also when they heard the footsteps of approaching lab technicians. Now why would they salivate for the dull thud of shoe against floor? Could it be one of those psychical reflexes?

  Eventually, Pavlov developed the science of the “conditioned response.” The dogs had learned to associate the footsteps with food. He spent the rest of his life experimenting with such conditioned behaviors. To Watson’s real admiration, Pavlov refused to speculate about what might be happening in the dogs’ brains. He considered that an internal process, one he could not measure. Pavlov would not even allow that the dogs might “recognize” the sound of footsteps. A brain activity such as recognition, Pavlov insisted, was untestable and therefore “needlessly speculative.” He had proved that dogs could be conditioned to drool in response to sound. That meant the brain could be trained—no more, no less. This methodical observationbased science was exactly what John B. Watson wanted in American psychology. When he thought of Pavlov, he said, he was determined to “give the master his due.”

  In his most extreme articulation of this philosophy, Watson proposed, in 1913, that perhaps the larynx controlled thought. Scientists could measure its activity. In those seconds or minutes (depending on intelligence) before people talked, the larynx was busily vibrating away. He reminded his colleagues that people don’t seem as smart and articulate when they have sore throats. In a letter to a friend at the University of Chicago, Watson closed: “No matter where you are, or what you do, I’ll be having a laryngeal perturbation about you every so often.”

  People are simple, Watson insisted, animals are simple. Dogs drool, we drool; rats develop conditioned habits, we develop the same. There are no higher humans and lower animals; he said that all are basic, all are regulated and driven by stimulus and response. By that logic, rats were an easy substitute for humans. And Watson preferred them as research subjects. But after World War I—in a curious parallel to Harry Harlow’s dilemma—he found that his university had closed his rat laboratory. As he explained to a friend, human infants were probably the next best subjects for simple experiments in psychology.

  If Pavlov could induce dogs to drool when they heard a metronome, Watson should be able to induce a baby to respond on cue as well. Watson began by simple conditioning of emotions, such as fear. He showed that you can make a baby afraid by sudden movement, an abrupt loss of support—such as by jerking a blanket out from under it. You can induce rage by pinning its arms down. You can condition love by stroking, he said. But could you condition a baby like one of Pavlov’s dogs, train it to respond to an unexpected stimulus? The resulting study, published in 1920, is still referred to as the ”Little Albert” experiment.

  Albert was a fat little baby at the time, nine months old, as calm and steady in his reactions as a seasoned soldier. He didn’t even get upset when a blanket was yanked away. Watson paraded strange objects before Albert: a friendly white rat, an energetic rabbit, a dog, a monkey wearing a mask, a monkey not wearing a mask, a wild fluff of cotton wool, even a burning newspaper. The child merely gurgled and watched with interest. He tried to pet the animals and fan the flames.

  Loud noises, however, terrified him. The experimenters discovered that if they banged a hammer on a steel bar—clanging the metal close to his ear—the child jumped. His arms flew up in the air. If they continued to clang, Albert began to sob. Watson decided to see whether he could “condition” Albert to fear a harmless object, such as the rat, by producing a clang of metal every time the animal approached. Watson admitted to some ethical hesitation. Should a researcher deliberately and repeatedly scare a small child? But he reassured himself that life would naturally get tough anyway “as soon as the child left the sheltered environment of the nursery for the rough and tumble of the home.”

  When cheerful Little Albert was eleven months old, the scientists seated him on a table covered by a soft mattress. Then they showed him another rat. For a brief moment, his face lit. He held out a hand to pet the furry head and—bang—the metal rods clanged by his head. The child fell forward crying, burying his face in the mattress. They did it again: The rat appeared and with it the wham of metal against metal. And again. And again, until finally, whenever Albert saw a rat, he began to whimper. “The instant the rat wa
s shown, the baby began to cry. Almost instantly, he turned sharply to the left, fell over on one side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.” A year after the experiment, Albert still sobbed if they even showed him a fur pelt.

  Little Albert underlined all the points that Watson wanted to make—that there was no essential difference between people and animals, that we could explain all behavior as simple conditioned reflex—at least all behavior worth explaining. Watson didn’t do any further baby studies. Those who followed his behaviorist credo didn’t do many, either. They didn’t need to—the baby was now a proven proxy for rodents, and vice versa. Later, people would wonder whether Albert feared the rat or perhaps John Watson, who appeared on film to be handling children pretty roughly. Later, critics would also point out that one set of experiments with one child shouldn’t really be considered proof of anything. A few people just didn’t think children should be treated so by scientists. Watson was dismissive on a grand scale. “Society is in the habit of seeing them [children] starve by hundreds, of seeing them grow up in dives and slums, without getting particularly wrought up about it. But let the hardy behaviorist attempt an experimental study of the infant or even begin systematic observation of it and criticism begins at once.”

  You could definitely count Harry as a John Watson critic, given as he was to talking about “the Watsonian scourge.” He thought the Little Albert study far too influential, describing it as “a trickle of data” that produced a flood of theory. He thought Watson’s larger pronouncements about children were wrong to the point of being dangerous. He worried about all those children raised in the bleak Watsonian landscape: “For a generation there was no major mental institution in the country without its population of Watson-raised babies.” Nor did he believe that all human behavior—Little Albert or no—could be compared to rats: “I am not for one moment disparaging the value of the rat as a subject for psychological investigation; there is very little wrong with the rat that cannot be overcome by the education of the experimenters.”