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

by Deborah Blum

  Of course, given the value of rat studies when he first started in psychology, Harry might have become just such a researcher if the University of Wisconsin had given him that rat lab. He wanted to study the hot animal of the time, and he did his best to make that happen in a series of makeshift facilities. If they had worked, he might yet have stuck out rodentology. The medical school offered him one room for research, but it was so small that he kept tripping over the rat cages. He was then given two rooms in the attic of another building, where he stayed until summer arrived. At that point, “the near solar temperature” in the attics, Harry said, threatened to fry the brains of rats and experimenters alike. He next tried putting the rat cages into two small rooms, near his office, in the administration building’s basement.

  Bascom Hall was a dignified and solid structure. At least that was true of the administrators’ offices on the upper levels. The windowless basement home for psychology was a poorly ventilated space partitioned into box-like rooms. Harry’s particular box turned out to be directly below the Dean of Men’s office. The pungent smell of rat bedding was sucked upward. Or, as Harry was rapidly informed by the administration, “noxious rodent odors floated fragrantly to the floor above.” Nervous students, waiting for a conference with the dean, could now be found leaning out the windows. This last fact appealed a little, okay, a lot, to Harry’s sense of humor.

  In later years, when he was firmly entrenched as a primate researcher, Harry tended to think of his early research efforts as pretty funny stuff. Not just getting his rats kicked out of Bascom Hall, although he told that story to all his friends. He also studied cats in the basement of a fraternity house next to his apartment. That experiment involved putting a cat in a little cradle wired to give a weak shock. Harry and an assisting student would ring a bell and the cat would get that little tingle of electricity. After a while, the cats would jump out of the cradle if they just heard the bell. It was a classic study in Pavlov’s techniques. “This process is called a conditioned response,” Harry said. “One of our cats was a little sensitive. When we rang the bell, he jumped out of the cradle, out of the basement window and kept right on going.” The professor and his student pelted up the stairs and out the front door of the frat house. They ran down the street, calling for the animal, and becoming increasingly winded. But, “it was a wonderful conditioned response. At least it was good for over a mile and a half, when we lost sight of the cat.”

  After his cat research, Harry tried similar experiments with frogs. Perhaps, he thought, amphibians could also be conditioned to respond to a ringing bell or flashing light. And undoubtedly they would be easier to catch. So Harry flashed lights. He rang bells. He applied mild shocks to the frogs’ legs. The frogs never seemed to make the association. A shock was a shock and a bell was a bell—that was apparently how his amphibians saw the situation.

  Harry was so exasperated by his frog experiments that one day he began venting to anyone who would listen. He even told his undergraduate class that he had spent countless hours just to prove that frogs were stupid. One of the students happened to be a reporter for the student newspaper, the Daily Cardinal, and the next day, Harry was in print: “Professor Harlow says that the frog is the dumbest of all animals.... Professor Harlow’s experiments showed that the frog does not seem to be able to learn anything at all.” It was a natural story for any journalist. The next day, one of the local papers rewrote the student version. It now carried the headline: “Frog Dumbest of Animals, Experimenters Discover.”

  That story was picked up by the wire services. Those wire stories led to a round of editorials on how scientists waste the taxpayers’ money and whether frogs might actually be smarter than scientists. “I never knew why but this choice little bit of information was circulated far and wide,” Harry wrote in his memoir. “My relatives scattered throughout the nation were amazed at my sudden and undignified rise to fame. My colleagues were amused or sarcastic. A couple of them suggested that I ought to see a psychiatrist.”

  Maybe therapy was the answer. But, finally, in sheer desperation, he went instead to visit the monkeys at the local zoo. The suggestion was actually made at a dinner party when Harry and Clara were partnering each other in bridge after the meal. Harry’s conversation, just then, tended to focus on his nonexistent laboratory. Obsessively. Oh, said an opposing bridge player, but you should check out the orangutans at the local zoo. Never mind cats and frogs and rats, what you should study is a really interesting primate. As Harry later remembered, his fellow bridge player told him to stop worrying so much. All would be fine. She thought that orangutans had a lot more charm than rats—and more than people, too.

  The Henry Vilas Zoological Park occupies a shady little pocket of land in the city of Madison, backed against a small lake called Wingra. The zoo grounds are designed as a friendly ramble amidst trees and cages. Picture for a minute Harry Harlow, in his late twenties, his face still so boyish that students continued to mistake him for a fellow undergraduate. He’s standing moodily in front of the orangutan cage, shoulders slumped, hands wedged in his pockets, staring. The orangutans are staring back—apes do that, they’re interested, too—and he’s thinking, he’s thinking ... he’s thinking, what the hell am I doing here? He’s thinking, what else is there? And finally, he’s thinking that at least one of the orangutans does seem rather charming.

  The easy going ape, named Jiggs, shared his cage with an outstandingly irritable female named Maggie. The two orangutans had been named after a popular comic strip of the time. The strip was a running domestic comedy. The story line featured an easygoing doormat of a man named Jiggs and his hot-tempered, rolling-pin-waving wife, Maggie. The old orangutans might have modeled for the comic strip. Harry described Jiggs as “the nicest and sweetest orangutan that had ever lived at any zoo for fifteen years.” Maggie, on the other hand, was “a girl with a one-track mind, a determination to keep Jiggs on the straight and narrow.” Whenever the old male displeased her—which as far as Harry could tell was every few minutes—she slapped him. Standing on the pathway, the young psychologist winced in sympathy. He asked the zoo director, Fred Winkleman, whether it would be possible for Jiggs to be separated from his mate, at least long enough for Harry to try him out on some standard intelligence tests. Perhaps Winkleman was also sympathetic. He said yes.

  So Harry Harlow and his startled students started making the onemile trek from campus to the Vilas Zoo. They brought tools for testing—tables and trays and blocks and puzzles. Among the challenges they gave Jiggs was one familiar to many nursery school children: putting the right peg into the right hole. The puzzle consisted of two oak blocks, one with a square hole and one with a round hole, along with two plungers, one square and one round.

  Jiggs loved it. He quickly learned to put the round plunger into the round hole. He discovered that it would also wedge into the square hole. He learned to put the square plunger in the square hole. But he was baffled by the discovery that the square peg would not go in the round hole. He worked on that problem, on and off, for hours. To Harry’s genuine sorrow, the old orangutan died about a year after the testing started. “At least,” Harry commented, “Jiggs died demonstrating a level of intellectual curiosity greater than that of many University of Wisconsin students.”

  Harry and his students went on to test a big male baboon named Tommy, who wasn’t nearly as sweet in temperament. Tommy liked to get it right, and right away. When he made a mistake, he was furious. The researchers had built a testing table for the experiments. They would hide food under cups on the table. Tommy’s task was to remember which cup hid the food. He was fine if he could look instantly. But when they were measuring length of memory, they would stave him off. In psychology, this is called a “delayed response trial.” To Tommy, it meant that he had to wait to look for the food, which he hated. Tommy was an unusually big baboon, weighing close to ninety pounds. Even medium-sized baboons can have memorable tantrums. Tommy would throw the cups and grab the
table, smashing it against the bars of his cage. The tests and the tantrums continued. Neither Professor Harlow nor Tommy was willing to back down. Cups continued to fly.

  And then the monkey developed a crush on one of the female students. At least that was Harry’s interpretation: “It was impossible to look at Betty and not know immediately that she was a girl,” he explained. You could also reason that Betty was just plain nice to Tommy. She fed him grapes. He would reach out his arms and she would rub his hands and wrists. She let him groom her arm—a standard gesture of friendship among many monkeys. When Betty ran the tests and Tommy had to wait for his turn, he would shake the bars of the cage, he would beat the floor, but he didn’t break the equipment anymore. Tommy thus passed the tests with great style. And Harry Harlow became hooked on primate research.

  In Jiggs’s determination, in Tommy’s eagerness to please a friend, even in Maggie’s bossiness, Harry saw behaviors far more complex, far more interesting, than popular psychology suggested. He saw personality and relationships. It was at the Henry Vilas Zoo, in the companionship of an irritable baboon and a good-natured orangutan, that he finally turned away from rat research. “These are not just monkey stories,” he said. “They are human interest stories and the reason why the monkeys, as far as our research was concerned, were in and the rats were out. The monkeys were so very, very much like people. No rat would have fallen in love with Betty.” He sometimes thought about how much those first days at the zoo had shaped his interests. And he also wondered about the direction he would have taken had the expected rat lab been provided. Harry doubted that it would have led him to study mother love. “In my fondest fantasies, I cannot envision a rat surrogate mother.” Spending his days at the local zoo, Harry was starting to feel a lot less foolish. Indeed, he was beginning to feel downright lucky.

  He was lucky in his first graduate student, too. He was assigned a passionate, Brooklyn-born independent thinker named Abraham Maslow. Professor and student bonded over a shared skepticism about the current trends in behavioral psychology. “Behaviorism has done a lot,” Maslow wrote in his own journal. “It was the beautiful program of Watson that brought me into psychology. But its fatal flaw is that it’s good for the lab and in the lab, but you put it on and take it off like a lab coat. It’s useless at home with your kids and wife and friends.... If you try to treat your children at home in the same way you treat your animals in the lab, your wife will scratch your eyes out.” Well, Maslow thought his wife would.

  Maslow cared most about human behavior. He believed that the mission of psychology was to help people reach their best potential. He never doubted that people had a best potential—rich with love, kindness, compassion. “People are all decent underneath,” Maslow wrote in his journal shortly after receiving his Ph.D. from Wisconsin. If people behaved badly, he thought, one could always find a reason and try to help with it. “All that is necessary to prove this is to find out what the motives are for their superficial behavior, nasty, mean, or vicious though that behavior may be. Once these motives are understood, it is impossible to resent the behavior that follows.” That unswerving dedication to decency—a foundation of the humanistic psychology movement—would make Harry’s student famous, a hero in the counterculture 1960s, an influential psychologist even today, long after his death.

  But in the early 1930s, Maslow was working at the Henry Vilas Zoo with Harry Harlow. Surprisingly, he liked it. He would come home, he remembered, wildly excited about some of the monkey experiments, so enthusiastic—like Harry, so suddenly turned to the parallels to human behavior—that “my wife ferociously warned me against experimenting on her babies.” Every day, Harry Harlow and Abraham Maslow were a little more impressed by monkeys and what they could do. There was something else—an almost unnerving awareness of a relationship. It wasn’t just the monkey-tomonkey connection that impressed them. They were thinking about the relationship between the animals and themselves, the scientists and their subjects. It was slowly dawning on them that if one wanted an animal model in psychology, the smart, emotional, complicated monkeys might make a whole lot more sense than the maze-running rats.

  This sense of kinship prompted Harry to ask hundreds of questions. What could monkeys actually do? What problems were they capable of figuring out? How close to human capabilities could they come? Maslow described his first assignment as running “a million boring delayed-reaction” experiments with monkeys, much like those that had so annoyed Tommy the baboon. The tests went like this: Maslow would show the animal some food and then, while the hungry monkey was watching, put the food under one of two cups. Then he would enforce a delay before the animal was allowed to search for the food. He would wait, one second, two, ten, thirty, sixty, whatever the design of the day proscribed. They wanted to know how good the animals’ memories were. Suppose every monkey lifted the correct cup after a five-second delay. How about thirty seconds? Longer? And so on. And then they would analyze other details. Did age matter? Species? Sex?

  Despite the nit-picking details, Maslow began to find the work addictive. The zoo-housed primates seemed to approach puzzles much as people would. If a monkey couldn’t solve a problem immediately, it would start fiddling with the puzzle, continuing through trial and error, testing what would work. These experiments would continue until the animal found the error and fixed it. It appeared that the animals were thinking their way through the puzzles. They seemed remarkably goal-directed. They wanted—again like their human cousins—to win. They liked to beat the game. When they did, they would look up at Maslow, almost grinning. He would find himself grinning back: “I became fond of my individual monkeys in a way that was not possible with my rats,” he wrote. And he liked Harry, who was only three years older, and more than open to friendship. They ate late dinners, talking over the work, trying to think where it might take them.

  Maslow didn’t like the University of Wisconsin. The ideas circulating in the psychology department seemed small to him, and the priorities equally as small. “The emphasis here is all on getting ahead,” he complained. “Two articles are good; four are twice as good. It’s all very mathematical apparently. There is a direct relationship between number of articles published and your ‘goodness’ as a psychologist.” He thought that his professor, working in basements at the local zoo, showed the most promise. Harry Harlow, he wrote in his journal, had the makings of “a very brilliant man.”

  Of course, Harry also made Maslow work hard. Because Lewis Terman’s standards were drilled into him, Harry insisted that Maslow make a rigorous study for his doctoral dissertation. When his graduate student protested that they’d already done innovative research—couldn’t he just write that up?—Harry assured him in advance that the new work would be even more brilliant.

  Maslow’s dissertation was on relationships. Who has power, who doesn’t? He spent hours at the zoo, watched thirty-five primates, from newborn to ancient, from spider monkey to baboon. He recorded every instance of what he considered dominant and submissive behavior. The resulting paper reads like a dictator’s guidebook—and a testament to the way that hierarchy shapes social lives.

  There was a clear sense of the system’s winners and losers. Maslow pointed out that the power monkeys, the alpha males, pretty much had it their own way. They took food whenever they wanted it from other monkeys. They bullied subordinates. They initiated fights if they sensed a challenge. And they were always able to score sexually. The alpha male is pretty much guaranteed fatherhood and genetic success. Subordinate behavior was the near opposite. Male monkeys low in the hierarchy would cower when the power males strutted by. They were passive when attacked or muscled away from the females they had been courting. Their behavior was purely defensive; if challenged, they ran. This was hardly a position that promised a wonderful genetic future.

  Maslow saw the ruler-and-serf pattern repeated across species. He concluded that the top-bottom structure defines most primate societies—monkeys, apes, and, although he di
d not say this, undoubtedly our own. In more recent years, primate researchers have marveled at the way a monkey pecking order can resemble a large corporation or a military hierarchy. If social order is controlled through dominance, Maslow said, even sexual relationships can assert power rather than affection. There’s little doubt that the latter also represents a facet of behavior that unfortunately is observed in human societies.

  Maslow showed that monkeys need beautifully tuned social skills to navigate these often risky social byways. He had been startled to see how savvy the monkeys were in dealing with each other. Primates in the wild could establish a relationship just by the way they looked at each other or gestured back and forth, he said. They could read body language. After studying each other, they might start a gentle grooming or they might just hurry the hell out of there. Such subtle exchanges served many of the animals well. It often allowed them, Maslow pointed out, to avoid bloody, destructive fighting.

  If an alpha male could just intimidate a young male challenger into backing off, he didn’t need to beat him away. That result might just delay the fight—but, for the moment, both monkeys remained physically intact. The zoo, of course, didn’t have enough animals in its colony for researchers to observe the full social range of behaviors. But it was clear that a social primate definitely needed to understand a vast and potentially treacherous terrain of relationships. If you didn’t like your place in the landscape, you needed to understand whether it was possible to move. For a young, ambitious monkey, the critical point in that decision would be challenging the hierarchy without, say, getting killed before achieving adulthood. If that didn’t look possible, then, obviously, the key to a successful life was learning how to get along.