The Well of Despair

Moving into the top three least ethical experiments we have Harry Harlow and his pits of monkey despair. No one would have worried if he'd done it to grasshoppers, but where would the fun in that have been? Which of the experiments do you think is worst?

	1960s & 70s
	What is love?
	Mentally torture monkeys in a variety of hideous ways to see if you can break them.
	You can irreparably damage monkeys if you’re nasty enough to them.
	The ‘well of despair’, ‘iron maiden’ and ‘the rape rack – how bad do you want to go?
	4/5

Details:
Harry Harlow, a comparative psychologist of the 1960s and 70s, is quite possibly one of the least ethical animal experimenters ever. He primarily studied the effects of maternal deprivation and social isolation in rhesus macaque monkeys, which basically involved their psychological torture for a period up to fifteen years long.

He is best known for his surrogate mother experiments which involved separating baby monkeys from their mothers and offering them a range of artificial alternatives to try and develop an understanding of love and emotional needs. The Iron Maiden was an artificial monkey covered in spikes and blasting out cold air; could baby macaques love this ‘evil mother’, Harlow wondered. He found that, no matter how bad the torture, the babies would not let go.

More disturbingly, Harlow developed his ‘well of despair’, in an attempt to produce an animal model of clinical depression. The pit was basically a trough with a lid, in which baby monkeys were placed alone for up to six weeks with no contact with the outside world. It turned them psychotic, most never recovered and couldn’t cope with being put back with their group. Some subsequently remained in isolation for 15 years.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Harlow also had a ‘rape rack’ where females could be inseminated against their will.

Harlow never acknowledged the extreme unethical nature of his work, even when fellow psychologists pointed out that his results would not generalise accurately onto humans.

‘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. I never have. I don't really like animals. I despise cats. I hate dogs. How could you love monkeys?’

It has been suggested that Harlow’s experiments were one of the founding points of the animal liberation movement.

Whatever you might think of his methods, however, Harlow highlighted how important ‘love’ is in our development. Since the 1930s, medics and psychologists had been advocating that children should be brought up with the minimum of affection. Harlow’s work made it obvious how damaging this approach could be.

Image: Sander Akkerman

Curing Homosexuality < Previous | See All | Next > The Milgram Expt