Harry Frederick Harlow Research Paper

Harry Frederick Harlow, an American psychologist, was born with the name Harry Israel, the third child, in Fairfield, Iowa, but changed his last name to Harlow because a man with a Jewish last name would have troubles finding a job. After a year at Reed College in 1923, he transferred to Stanford University, where he completed his bachelor’s degree with a major in psychology in 1927. Continuing in graduate school at Stanford, Harlow was influenced by Calvin Stone, Lewis Terman, and Walter Miles, and received his Ph.D. degree in 1930 with a dissertation on the social facilitation of eating in laboratory rats. However, Harlow was best known for his experiments on “contact comfort” within rhesus monkeys which gave proof to the belief of love’s importance in child development and the dangers of isolation within children at a young age. Harlow joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin in 1930. Although he had been hired as a comparative psychologist, he found the animal facilities had been torn down which led him to study primates at the local Vilas Park Zoo, where he developed the Wisconsin General
Rhesus monkeys were ideal subjects. Harlow studied many complex problems, including the Weigle oddity task, delayed response learning, discrimination reversal tasks, and patterned string tests. His best known work in this field concerned learning sets. Given a series of similar discrimination learning problems, Harlow found that the more problems the monkeys solved, the better they got at learning. The result for the late stages of acquisition seemed to require a more cognitive process than those offered by the trial and error theories of the time. Harlow also developed his own theory, error factor theory, which was the elimination of false response tendencies rather than the learning of new responses that deserves