Animal studies

Method: Lorenz took a large clutch of goose eggs & kept them until they were about to hatch out.  Half of the eggs were then placed under a goose mother, while Lorenz kept the other half beside himself for several hours.

Results: When the geese hatched Lorenz imitated a mother duck's quacking sound, upon which the young birds regarded him as their mother and followed him accordingly.  The other group followed the mother goose. 

Lorenz found that geese follow the first moving object they see, during a 12-17 hour critical period after hatching.  

Conclusion:  This process is known as imprinting, and suggests that attachment is innate and programmed genetically.

Aim: To investigate if babies are more attached to food or comfort. 

Method: 16 monkeys were separated from their mothers immediately after birth & placed in cages with access to 2 surrogate mothers, one made of wire & one covered in soft cloth.

• 8 monkeys got milk from the wire mother.

• 8 monkeys got milk from the cloth mother. 

• Animals were studied for various lengths of time.

Results: Baby monkeys cuddled the soft object in preference to the wire one & sought comfort from the cloth one when frightened regardless of which dispensed milk.

Conclusion: This shows that “contact comfort” was of more importance to the monkeys than food when it came to attachment behaviour.  

R: Study was conducted in a controlled, lab setting: Harlow was able to control potential extraneous variables - monkeys being taken away from mothers straight after birth, baby monkeys not being exposed to any love/attention from biological mothers.:)

V: Highly controlled lab setting that Harlow used isn’t reflective of real-life situations & may cause the monkeys to behave in an artificial manner. Harlow wasn’t necessarily measuring the real-life attachment formation - study can be criticized for lacking ecological validity. :(

E: Monkeys in Harlow’s study showed great distress when they were removed from biological mothers. After the study, when monkeys were placed in a situation with other monkeys (who hadn’t been involved in Harlow’s original research), the monkeys from the study showed great distress in social situations & were unable to communicate with other monkeys. When monkeys from the study had their own children many were said to neglect their offspring & (in some extreme circumstances) killed their offspring. Harlow’s study fails to protect the monkeys from harm. :( 

G: Study is ungeneralizable as Lorenz only tested attachment with geese - can't generalize findings to other animals + humans, other animals + humans may have different attachments. :( 

R: Lots of controlled variables which makes it easy to replicate. Findings are reliable as the experiment has been repeated with the same results. :)

V: High ecological validity as it was a field experiment.  IV: Whether the geese saw Lorenz or their mother first, DV: who they imprint on. High internal validity - accomplished what it had set out to do and high external validity as findings apply to all geese. :)  Low population validity as it doesn't apply to humans. :(

E: Not ethical as geese aren't protected from psychological harm, can't give consent. :(