attachment - lorenz + harlow Flashcards
Outline Lorenz’s 1935 study into attachment
Lorenz randomly divided a large clutch of goose eggs.
One half were hatched with the mother goose in their natural environment.
The other half hatched in an incubator where the first moving object they saw was Lorenz.
Found incubator group followed Lorenz, control group followed the mother.
Lorenz identified a critical period in which imprinting needs to take place e.g. a few hours after hatching.
If imprinting did not occur in that time, chicks did not attach themselves to a mother figure.
Lorenz also observed that imprinting was directly linked to later sexual behaviour, e.g. animals will choose to mate with the same kind of object upon which they were imprinted (sexual imprinting).
Outline imprinting
- Innate instinct aimed at maximising survival chances of young.
- By keeping close proximity to attachment figure (mother) their chances of survival (protection, food) increase.
Evaluation of Lorenz’s - chickens
Guiton (1966) found chicks that imprinted on yellow rubber gloves often attempted to mate with the gloves as adults.
This supports Lorenz’s theory that imprinting can occur on any moving object.
However, Guiton found that imprinting not permanent and irreversible - if chicks spent more time with own species, they returned to usual mating behaviour.
So although imprinting innate behaviour, subsequent learning can alter this instinct.
Outline Harlow’s 1959 study into attachment
Harlow reared 16 rhesus monkeys with two wire model ‘mothers’.
- Condition 1 - Milk was dispensed by plain-wire mother
- Condition 2 - Milk was dispensed by cloth-covered mother
The monkeys’ preferences were measured.
To measure attachment-like behaviour, Harlow observed how the monkeys reacted when placed in frightening situations e.g. noisy mechanical bear.
Harlow also studied to monkeys who had been deprived of a ‘real’ mother into adulthood.
Found that baby monkeys cuddled the cloth-covered mother in preference to the plain-wire mother regardless of which dispensed milk, and sought comfort from cloth mother when frightened.
The monkeys sought comfort from the cloth-covered mother when frightened.
As adults, the monkeys who had been deprived of their real mothers suffered severe consequences - they were more aggressive, less sociable and less skilled at mating than other monkeys.
Evaluate Harlow’s study into attachment - ethical issues + counterargument
- There are many ethical issues with the experiment.
- Monkeys were purposely frightened to see reaction, and effects of not having a mother had a long-term effects on monkeys, including them smashing their own infant’s face to the ground, not being able to socialise normally with other monkeys.
- However, can be argued that the findings from the experiment made suffering of monkeys justifiable due to this being outweighed by the benefits the findings had on insight into attachment process, and long term effects of failing to attach.
Evaluation of both Lorenz & Harlow’s study into attachment - generalisability to humans
Humans have far more complex behaviours than monkeys/geese.
Monkeys clinging to cloth covered wire do not reflect the complex emotional connections and interaction that characterise human attachments.
Results cannot be extrapolated to humans.
Evaluate Harlow’s study into attachment - useful
This research has had important implications for the understanding of attachment, for example that comfort is more important than food, and the consequences of not forming an attachment. This increases its usefulness.
Evauate Harlow’s study into attachment - confounding variable
Some have criticised the study as having a confounding variable. The two mothers did not only differ in terms of the wire/cloth variable. Unfortunately, they were given different heads and faces. This might act as a confounding variable as it makes us unsure whether the monkeys only preffered the cloth mother because of the comfort it provided. This means that the internal validity of the study is challenged.
