The Dark Side of Science: The Surrogate Mother Experiment (Short Documentary)

#science #experiment

Do you think this experiment was unethical let me know in the comments.

University of Wisconsin–Madison Psychologist Harry Harlow sought out test the bond between infant and mother.

This led to the 1950s Monkey Mother Experiment and Paper the "Nature of love".

The experiment used a wire and cloth surrogate mother on isolated rhesus Monkey babies.

Harry Harlow’s monkey studies have gone down in history as a controversial and horrific footnote in science.

Welcome to the dark side of science.

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[tadness]

"The Cloth Mother" and "The Wire Mother" sound like names of characters in a survival horror game.

[Dr_KW]

Baby monkey: "Mom I'm scared"
Cloth Mother : O _ O

[reetodd]

Keep in mind at the time of the experiments it was a quickly growing belief that you should nurture your child as little as possible

[Bugggboyyy]

Humans: “we can’t accept aliens what if the aliens are evil?”

Also humans:

[oil-robin]

I have a theory that the cloth mother was preferred because it was cute and the wire mother is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen

[virginiahansen]

You forgot the part where the monkey-reactor melted down.

[InsomniacFlaaffy]

It's always in the 50s for these weird experiments

[deptusmechanikus]

Reject humanity, return to monnnk... nevermind. Stay human, it's actually great. A lot lesser chances of your entire life being a cruel and terrifying experiment. Still not zero, but a lot less

[fetusdeletus]

I like the fact that this guy went “you know how mothers and their children love each other unconditionally? Well what if they didn’t”

Edit: Okay Jesus I get it y’all had shitty childhoods, stop bothering me about it and go get some damn therapy cuz some y’all really need it.

[axelprino]

So he basically went "let's traumatize baby monkeys, for science of course"

[LycanWitch]

2:38 pretty crazy to think that back then, a psychologist could just walk over to a zoo and get permission to conduct traumatizing psychological tests against the zoo animals.

[Indyjonesfan]

The pit of despair. So they built a high school?

[mikadeca]

"The only thing I care about is whether a monkey will turn out a property I can publish. I don't have any love for them. Never have. I don't really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you like monkeys?"

Harry Harlow

Interview with Pittsburgh Press-Roto, 1974. Quoted in Blum, Deborah. The Monkey Wars. Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 92.

[raphicoco]

4:30 this legit broke my heart to see. How horrible it must be for him to react such a way ;_;

[eef_]

I thought the wire mother and cloth mother drawings were just like... quick drawing and not accurate representation. I was wrong. They were both so extremely scary, especially the cloth mother-

[franglish]

He did several other studies, like ones involving forced mating monkeys...

The wire mother experiment was just the beginning.

[kenthephotoguy]

In another experiment, the non-nurtured monkeys were tasked with operating a nuclear reactor with no containment vessel which was cooled by the reservoir made by damming a creek with mine tailings.... But the results of that experiment will be covered in a future video.

[Siarawaszympanemjest]

Well, that hits close to home. I was basically raised by a food provider, but with a twist - i quickly had to learn to associate any kind of contact with my mother with either physical or psychological pain. I had no healthy social skills before school and was extremely suspicious of anyone approaching me, quick to lash out at any form of attention. I only started to learn how to deal with other people at, say, 12-15, when the absolute control of my mother eased up because of me starting to get physically stronger than her. Still up to this day I wasn't able to sustain any of my relationships because of subconscious association of any kind of attention with potential danger - when I was presented with true love of my partner I didn't know how to behave and the tendency was to withdraw and fight it off. So, yeah, thanks mom - I can kinda function in a society now, but I'm still fucked beyond belief.

[LadyDeirdre]

The results were completely predictable. The baby monkey goes to the cloth mother, then visits the wire mother when in need of food. How surprising.