Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection

  For most of us, Maslow concluded, getting along with each other was exactly the way to navigate through a long life—and, perhaps, even a happy one.

  Harry was unabashedly proud of Maslow’s work. In his view, the work on dominance was one of the best studies on power relations ever done. And Maslow had accomplished it, Harry pointed out, in a small zoo, working under a professor who had no research budget. “Now that is creativity, when you can work with nothing and make a great scientific breakthrough,” he wrote.

  Even so, Harry was getting tired of working with nothing. He knew, Maslow knew, that monkeys were extraordinary animals. But almost no one else did. There was no network of federal primate research centers, although later Harry would help create that network. He no longer wanted a rat laboratory. He wanted a primate lab. To be taken seriously, he needed a place where he could gather his own animals, control his own experiments. Reporting out of the local zoo was not going to work indefinitely. It had been two years, by now, since Harry had arrived in Madison. The university still showed no interest in providing him research space of any kind. He was out of patience. If he was going to work in some outpost of science, a psychologist on monkey island, then he wanted a decent island.

  The story of how Harry Harlow built the first primate lab at the University of Wisconsin still stands as a testament to determination—and deviousness.

  In 1932, the university finally offered him an abandoned building. Harry described this gift horse as a “twenty-six-foot-square, two-story building on the wrong side of the Milwaukee Railroad tracks.” The building was an old forest service property, built to test wood products such as crates and boxes. The interior was a maze of reinforced concrete posts. Some were slender spikes. The largest were sixteen feet tall and six feet by three feet at the base. The ground floor also held a tangle of disconnected pipes. The university would let Harry have the building as long as he didn’t expect much in the way of remodeling money or help with the construction. He didn’t care. It was a space, his space. “It looked awfully good to us,” he said.

  Harry persuaded a new graduate student, Paul Settlage, to help work on the building. Settlage was a friend of Maslow’s. He was far less sure of where he wanted to go with psychology and more than willing to join in such a nontraditional approach to the field. Bearing sledgehammers, he and his professor marched up to the proposed laboratory. First, Harry wanted to clear out the forest of pipes and pillars. They managed to smash out a couple of small pillars, but the big ones barely cracked. The next day, Paul brought a cousin, Walter Grether, who was working on a degree in physics. The three of them chipped away a few more pillars. The next day, Paul and Walter brought pneumatic hammers.

  Within a week, neither Harry nor his student helpers resembled anything like members of an academic department. They were gritty with concrete, dust, and sweat. By the time they had finished clearing out the factory—Harry estimated that they removed a good thousand feet of pipe—they looked like bodybuilders. Harry was struck by their newly bulging biceps and chunky shoulder muscles. “No matter how abstract our research became, it started out by being very concrete,” he joked. By the end of the project, Grether had decided that psychology—or perhaps Harry Harlow—was a lot more interesting than physics. He changed his major.

  “They just don’t make graduate students like that these days,” Harry once said, acknowledging that his early protegees not only studied at the primate lab, they built it. But when he and his team had finished remodeling the box factory, they immediately realized that it was too small. The university refused to approve or finance an expansion. Again, Harry was ready to get around that. There was a fair amount of land around the old building and one of his students had suggested that they might at least build some outdoor cages. Harry appealed to the university for materials to build these lightweight structures. This time, he won official approval.

  It was all he needed. After all, Harry reasoned, the cages needed a concrete floor that could be hosed down. And you can’t just pour cement straight onto the ground. So they put down six inches of cinders, four inches of crushed rock, and poured a good solid foundation. This was heavy work, obviously; but Harry had a few members of the football team in his class and he talked them into helping, “since they weren’t doing very well in their studies.” Watching the halfbacks and fullbacks heave sacks of cement around was “a beautiful sight,” Harry said. They were in such good condition, he was sure they would have an undefeated season.

  And as long as they were putting down such a good foundation, Harry thought they might as well put up good wall framing. Why not build those frames with studs that would allow doors and windows? He and his students covered the walls with insulating material. But then, well, Harry worried about the roof. After all, it snowed a lot in Wisconsin. So they put on a solid, sturdy roof. But then the wellinsulated walls and the roof made the cages so dark that no one could see anything inside them. “There is no use in having an observation cage if you can’t see in it,” Harry said. So they cut out spaces for windows. As long as they were doing that, it seemed reasonable to open up the doors, too.

  It occurred to Harry that the cages would get pretty hot in the sun. The only solution seemed to be to cover them with better insulation. So they covered the insulating panels with siding. “The drop siding cost considerable money. The only sensible answer seemed to be to give it a coat of paint.” And then it turned out that the tarpaper on the roof kept peeling up. So they re-covered the roof with asbestos shingles. The shingles happened to have a twenty-year warranty. The new structure was so close to the lab building that it made sense to add corridors connecting it to the laboratory. The lab crew could do that with leftover concrete and wood scraps. “When we finished, we were horrified to see how much these Outdoor Observation Cages looked like real buildings.”

  The university was horrified, too. Harry received what he called a “very sharp note” from the comptroller saying that it was absolutely illegal to build wooden buildings that didn’t meet state specifications. Harry was unfazed. He had just loaned the university president a monkey (as a pet for the president’s son), and the chief administrator himself had picked it up. Harry and his students were sitting on the roof, driving in nails at the time. “After we put on our shirts, we had a very friendly chat with the president. As far as we could tell, he wouldn’t have cared if all his staff built laboratories.”

  So Harry wrote to the comptroller explaining that this was just a project that had gotten out of hand. And, by the way, it needed some electrical wiring, steam heat, overhead lights, and good ventilating fans to really be up to code. While the university electricians were connecting the fans, Harry persuaded them to wire in floor plugs. The following year, his new extension appeared on the official campus map.

  The laboratory now resembled nothing so much as a ramshackle house with a deeply overgrown yard. Harry dug into his own pockets again and paid for some shrubbery to give the laboratory—and the monkeys—some privacy. The researchers planted ivy and grapes along the fence, honeysuckle bushes, wisteria, lilacs, forsythia, pine trees, and poplars. “In the summer, we couldn’t see out and others couldn’t see in.”

  It was a cheerful, informal place. Everyone had to do odd jobs to make it work, including the professor. If students were short of money, Harry let them unfold cots and sleep there. One summer, Paul and Walter, almost broke, moved into the laboratory and made their meals out of bread and fish caught from the campus lake. They occasionally shared tidbits with the monkeys. One black spider monkey named Gandhi loved the fish so much that they eventually let him join them at the backyard table for lunch. “By the end of the summer, Gandhi had table manners that would have been a credit to a Harvard man,” Harry said.

  He was building up his small colony of monkeys: spider monkeys, like Gandhi, who were agile South American tree dwellers; a small group of capuchins, another South American rainforest species, once famed as organ grinder monkeys. There were
Asian monkeys, too, especially sturdy rhesus macaques from India, who would eventually become the primary lab dwellers. The monkeys were built differently, colored differently, and regarded each other with deep suspicion. They seemed equally suspicious of their captors—but not hostile. Harry once accidentally locked himself into a monkey cage and only escaped when three passing sailors, home on leave, heard him yelling and pried the door off its hinges. The monkeys had apparently considered Harry an extremely odd cage mate because they gave him as much room as possible during the entire episode.

  Occasionally—too frequently—the animals escaped themselves. They could free themselves from cages far more adeptly, Harry noted, than researchers. In his early days, he said, they often had at least one monkey in a tree. On one occasion, half a dozen macaques terrorized a small neighborhood near the campus for more than a week. They raided restaurant kitchens and threw acorns out of trees at passersby until they were finally trapped after trooping through a window to explore a second-floor apartment.

  At this point, Harry had wonderful stories to tell—during the week-long monkey escape, he had received a letter from Canada advising him to get the animals drunk—and some genuinely compelling studies of monkey intelligence. Mostly, he had small-scale tests at the zoo. Now, he had a place to show off what he—and, more important, his monkeys—could do. He had big plans for the systematic, controlled studies that would convince the behaviorist, ratmodel-trained psychologists who surrounded him. Now that his laboratory was completed—shabby, patched together, but there—he had every intention of tackling some of the mysteries of the thinking brain. Of course, he still wasn’t sure exactly how to do that.

  FOUR

  The Curiosity Box

  It is my belief that if we face our problems honestly and without regard to, or fear of, difficulty, the theoretical psychology of the future will catch up with, and eventually even surpass, common sense.

  Harry F. Harlow, 1953

  AT THE LITTLE LAB IN MADISON, Harry had a group of three capuchins, those limber, bright-eyed animals once known as organ grinder’s monkeys. He named them Capuchin, Cinnamon, and Red. God, they were smart.

  Even in so small a cluster, the three males formed one of Maslow’s dominance hierarchies. Capuchin was the boss monkey, Cinnamon second, and Red third. Capuchin was not a nice monkey. He was a bossy, greedy little food-hoarder. He took the best treats for himself. He took the others’ scraps, too. He would share with Cinnamon, but not with the lowly Red. Red, perpetually hungry, was driven to plotting for his meals. He would creep cautiously up, when Capuchin was busy, and sneak back his stolen dinner.

  One summer morning, Harry and an anthropology student, Leland Cooper, were standing somewhat idly by the capuchins’ outdoor cage, when Red came by on a crumb-foraging expedition. Up stepped Cinnamon, the big fat tattletale, screeching out threats and yelling for Capuchin. To all appearances, Red then lost his temper. He grabbed a stick from the cage floor and gave Cinnamon an angry poke. And when the alpha monkey, Capuchin, muscled his way over, Red whacked him, too, even though “he had never been known to use a stick for striking at any time prior to this.”

  Once having realized the weapon’s potential, though, Red didn’t forget it. Cooper later reported another incident in which Red and a fellow capuchin were sharing cage space with five burly rhesus macaques. Macaques are bigger, tougher, and meaner than capuchins. They slid into bully mode, forming a circle around the two smaller monkeys. According to Cooper, Red picked up a stick again and started whistling it through the air around him. But the macaques were too quick for him to reach and they leaped resentfully out of range. Still, they stayed out of range and left the little capuchins alone after that.

  One of the most interesting aspects of the story of Red, the stickwielding capuchin, is how long it took Harry Harlow to tell it. The observations were made in 1936. The report was published in 1961. He explained that “publication delay resulted from the authors’ reluctance to report this unusual observation until they had achieved established reputations.” Animal intelligence was an oxymoron when Harry Harlow was building his primate laboratory. This was the day, after all, of the conditioned response and the simple and reflexive brain. For an animal to reason that a stick was a useful weapon would suggest thought and calculation. A scientist who reported that kind of cognitive ability in monkeys in the 1930s was likely to be branded a sloppy observer or a wishful thinker. Or both.

  It was a rare moment of caution for Harry. Perhaps even caution is too strong a word, for some calculation was also involved. He knew that monkeys were smarter than the profession would admit. The trick was figuring out how to prove that. Plenty of scientists before him had based their arguments on similar anecdotes and failed to sway the crowd. Nineteenth-century proposals for animal intelligence had been dismissed as sentimental or as based on anecdotes rather than evidence. Some very good early twentieth-century psychologists had done studies showing strong evidence of problemsolving abilities in chimpanzees without reversing the general prejudice against intelligence in other species. They included the respected American psychologist, Robert Yerkes, and Wolfgang Kohler, a German gestalt psychologist who had done a famous series of experiments in the early 1900s when he put chimpanzees in a cage with bananas dangling overhead. To reach the bananas, the apes had to figure out that they could stack boxes, which were tumbled in the cage, and climb them. Kohler had argued that this was a genuine “Aha” moment, that chimpanzees were capable of insight. Kohler’s work is heralded today. At the time, though, he struggled to make his point. The leaders in behaviorist psychology accused him of superimposing human behavior on another species. As Harry’s student, Abe Maslow complained, successful psychologists wouldn’t even listen to the argument: “It is now fashionable to despise Gestalt psychology,” he wrote in his journal. “Accordingly, they all despise it.”

  It would be easy for Harry to become more of an outcast than he already was. To make his case, he needed more than good monkey stories, clever anecdotes. There had to be a way to devise a believable intelligence test for monkeys, something systemic, something objective. He was working cautiously in that direction when two events drove him more directly into the fray: He went to New York. And he lost his temper.

  In 1939, Harry received a one-year fellowship in anthropology at Columbia University. The Harlows moved to Manhattan for the academic year. The call from New York was perfectly timed; Harry had that restless, itchy, something-around-the-corner feeling about his work. Clara was expecting their first child. She decided to take the months in New York as an opportunity to enjoy being a mother and to think about what might come next. She wrote to her mother, with typical determination: “I have a feeling that a job will get me again but not until we have a firm hold on family plans. I do not agree with women who take six weeks off to have a baby. I want first to know my own child thoroughly so I will know what parts of his life to leave to others and what to keep management of myself.” Robert Mears Harlow was born on November 16, 1939, and both Harry and Clara were mesmerized. The baby, according to Clara, was just “irresistible,” and Harry was spending extra hours at home to admire him.

  At least he was until Kurt Goldstein came to lecture.

  Goldstein was one of the great European neurologists of the day—intense, brilliant, passionate. His research blended concern for mental health with hardheaded clinical study. A native German, he had worked long and desperate hours trying to help soldiers with head injuries after World War I. Goldstein’s experience with brain damage had led him to try to understand how the brain was organized so that he could learn how to repair it. He had patiently tested injured soldiers, seeking to determine which head injury produced which specific failure of memory or motor skills. What kind of damage twisted numbers around? What made words vanish?

  Goldstein had found that the brain-damaged soldiers were more rigid and inflexible in their responses. They could do what he called “concrete” learning—rote memo
rization, simple recitation of stored facts. But ask them to reason through a problem, such as change the order of numbers, the pattern of the shapes, and the soldiers struggled. They seemed almost paralyzed by the shift in perspective. His patients had lost their “abstract attitude,” in Goldstein’s terminology. They were unable to adjust their answers. Their thought processes seemed to have stiffened and become “concrete,” he said.

  Early in 1940, when little Robert Harlow was just a few months old, Columbia scheduled a series of lectures by Goldstein. The old neurologist promptly began talking about his famous division of concrete and abstract intelligence. He went beyond brain injuries, though. He used the same dividing line to separate humans from the other primates. Goldstein had never been fully able to accept Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, the notion that the brains of humans and other animals might have common origins. At Columbia he declared flatly that monkeys sat on a lower rung of intellect. They could accomplish rote learning, he said, but nothing complex, and never abstract reasoning. Monkeys were born to be no more than the brain-damaged soldiers in their abilities. The other primates were concrete learners. Only humans could achieve analytical intelligence.

  Harry sat through those lectures in a state of increasing disbelief. Goldstein was an inspiring teacher, Harry said, but he was absolutely and completely wrong about other primates. Harry had now spent eight years watching monkeys. He knew that they could reason their way through a problem, rethink a challenge. Wasn’t that exactly what Red had done, when defending himself with sticks? And there were countless others, from Jiggs and his puzzle work to Tommy’s pleasure in getting the right answers. Back in Wisconsin, Harry had another monkey that he considered a natural engineer. In one simple test, that capuchin had matched Kohler’s chimpanzees when he balanced sticks and boxes against the side of a building to reach food that the scientists had cleverly dangled from the roof. Harry found himself indignant on behalf of his animals. If his teacher really believed that monkeys possessed only concrete thought processes, Harry wrote to a friend, then Goldstein was “a cement wit” himself.