The nature of love

[Soundtrack]

In 1957 Harry Harlow devised an experiment designed to take a pop at psychoanalytic drive theories of bonding ("Mummy gratifies my hunger. I love Mummy"). He wrote up his findings in a paper bearing the tongue-in-cheek title The Nature of Love.

The experiment proceeded thus: infant rhesus monkeys were separated at birth from their mothers and reared with the help of surrogate wire 'mothers' to which feeding bottles had been attached. 

The monkeys were also presented with another ‘mother’, this one without the feeding bottle, but covered with soft terry nappy material.

The infant monkeys showed a clear preference for the cuddly mothers, clinging to these surrogates for 18 hours a day (as they would to a real mother) even though they were fed exclusively from the wire mother and even ‘punished’ with sudden blasts of compressed air as they clung to the cloth stand-ins.