Harry Harlow

Harry Frederick Harlow (October 31, 1905 – December 6, 1981) was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of caregiving and companionship to social and cognitive development.

He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow worked with him for a short period of time.

Harlow's experiments were ethically controversial; they included creating inanimate wire and wood surrogate "mothers" for the rhesus infants.

Each infant became attached to its particular mother, recognizing its unique face.

Harlow then investigated whether the infants had a preference for bare-wire mothers or cloth-covered mothers in different situations: with the wire mother holding a bottle with food, and the cloth mother holding nothing, or with the wire mother holding nothing, while the cloth mother held a bottle with food.

The monkeys overwhelmingly chose the cloth mother, with or without food, only visiting the wire mother that had food when needing sustenance.

Later in his career, he cultivated infant monkeys in isolation chambers for up to 24 months, from which they emerged intensely disturbed.

Some researchers cite the experiments as a factor in the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States.

Harry Harlow was born on October 31, 1905, to Mabel Rock and Alonzo Harlow Israel.

Harlow was born and raised in Fairfield, Iowa, the third of four brothers.

Little is known of Harlow's early life, but in an unfinished autobiography he recollected that his mother was cold to him and he experienced bouts of depression throughout his life.

After a year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Harlow obtained admission to Stanford University through a special aptitude test.

After a semester as an English major with nearly disastrous grades, he declared himself as a psychology major.

Harlow attended Stanford in 1924, and subsequently became a graduate student in psychology, working directly under Calvin Perry Stone, a well-known animal behaviorist, and Walter Richard Miles, a vision expert, who were all supervised by Lewis Terman.

Harlow studied largely under Terman, the developer of the Stanford-Binet IQ Test, and Terman helped shape Harlow's future.

After receiving a PhD in 1930, he changed his name from Israel to Harlow.

The change was made at Terman's prompting for fear of the negative consequences of having a seemingly Jewish last name, even though his family was not Jewish.

Directly after completing his doctoral dissertation, Harlow accepted a professorship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Harlow was unsuccessful in persuading the Department of Psychology to provide him with adequate laboratory space.

As a result, Harlow acquired a vacant building down the street from the university, and, with the assistance of his graduate students, renovated the building into what later became known as the Primate Laboratory, one of the first of its kind in the world.

Under Harlow's direction, it became a place of cutting-edge research at which some 40 students earned their PhDs.

Harlow came to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1930 after obtaining his doctorate under the guidance of several distinguished researchers, including Calvin Stone and Lewis Terman, at Stanford University.

He began his career with nonhuman primate research.

He worked with the primates at Henry Vilas Zoo, where he developed the Wisconsin General Testing Apparatus (WGTA) to study learning, cognition, and memory.

It was through these studies that Harlow discovered that the monkeys he worked with were developing strategies for his tests.

What would later become known as learning sets, Harlow described as "learning to learn."

Harlow married his first wife, Clara Mears, in 1932.

One of the select students with an IQ above 150 whom Terman studied at Stanford, Clara was Harlow's student before becoming romantically involved with him.

The couple had two children together, Robert and Richard.

In order to study the development of these learning sets, Harlow needed access to developing primates, so he established a breeding colony of rhesus macaques in 1932.

Harlow and Mears divorced in 1946.

That same year, Harlow married child psychologist Margaret Kuenne.

They had two children together, Pamela and Jonathan.

He served as head of the Human Resources Research branch of the Department of the Army from 1950 to 1952, head of the Division of Anthropology and Psychology of the National Research Council from 1952 to 1955, consultant to the Army Scientific Advisory Panel, and president of the American Psychological Association from 1958 to 1959.

Harlow received numerous awards and honors, including election to the United States National Academy of Sciences (1951), the Howard Crosby Warren Medal (1956), election to the American Philosophical Society (1957), the National Medal of Science (1967), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1961), and the Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation (1973).

Margaret died on 11 August 1971, after a prolonged struggle with cancer, with which she had been diagnosed in 1967.

Her death led Harlow to depression once more, for which he was treated with electro-convulsive therapy.

In March 1972, Harlow remarried Clara Mears.

The couple lived together in Tucson, Arizona, until Harlow's death in 1981.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Harlow as the 26th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.