Name: Sanika Kadam

MA Part 1

Research Methodology Assignment

Experiment Analysis
 Harolw Rhesus Monkey Experiment

Aim: To show the importance of early attachments, affection, and emotional bonds on the course

of healthy development.

Method:

Experimental and qualitative

Experiment 1: Harlow (1958) separated infant monkeys from their mothers immediately after

birth and placed in cages with access to two surrogate mothers, one made of wire and one

covered in soft terry toweling cloth. The terrycloth mother provided no food, while the wire

mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk.

Experiment 2: Harlow (1958) modified his experiment and separated the infants into two groups:

the terrycloth mother which provided no food, or the wire mother which did.

Variables:

Independent Variables-

1. The isolation that the monkeys were being exposed to.

Dependent variables-

1. The reactions and behaviors exhibited by the monkeys

Control:

Experiment 1: The terrycloth mother provided no food, while the wire mother did, in the form of

an attached baby bottle containing milk.

Experiment 2: The terrycloth mother which provided no food, or the wire mother which did.

Design:

Experimental Design

Sample:

The participant in Harlow's experiment were 8 infant rhesus macaque monkeys who never

experienced their mother’s love.

Procedure:

The investigation involved separating 8 infant monkeys (Rhesus Macaque) a few hours after

birth. The monkeys were separated into cages each containing the two surrogate mothers.

Followed by then raising the monkey using the surrogate mothers, one cloth covered ‘mother’

provided for warmth and comfort, typically used as a base for exploration and one wire mesh

‘mother’ provided for food. Harlow then modified the experiment and gave the infants no choice

of mothers. The two mothers were placed into each cage, thus being roughly the same size as an

average Rhesus mother (47cm). A feeding bottle was added to the wire mesh mother roughly

where the breast on the mother would be.

Findings/Result:

The study showed the monkey spent more time on the cloth covered mother, even though

physical nourishment came from the wire mesh mother. This suggests infant love isn’t a simple

response to the satisfaction of physiological needs. When fed on the cloth mother the infant

monkey spent 0-1 hours a day at the most on the wire mother and the rest on the cloth mother,
whereas when the wire mother had the bottle, the monkey spent approximately 1-2 hours, during

the start of the process approximately 6 hours then gradually spending more time.

Conclusion:

Harlow concluded that for a monkey to develop normally s/he must have some interaction with

an object to which they can cling during the first months of life (critical period). Clinging is a

natural response - in times of stress the monkey runs to the object to which it normally clings as

if the clinging decreases the stress. He also concluded that early maternal deprivation leads to

emotional damage but that its impact could be reversed in monkeys if an attachment was made

before the end of the critical period. However, if maternal deprivation lasted after the end of the

critical period, then no amount of exposure to mothers or peers could alter the emotional damage

that had already occurred. Harlow found therefore that it was social deprivation rather than

maternal deprivation that the young monkeys were suffering from. When he brought some other

infant monkeys up on their own, but with 20 minutes a day in a playroom with three other

monkeys, he found they grew up to be quite normal emotionally and socially.

Strengths:

Through Harlow's findings, it’s now evident that children can grow up to be physically and

mentally adjusted even if they did not form a robust attachment with their mother, as it depends

on how much comfort they obtain, which could be from many diverse attachments. Therefore,

children who have been adopted, or who lost a parent, should not be thought of as ‘maladjusted’,

if they have had copious sincere attachments with people.

Weakness:

• Harlow used monkeys and related them to humans.

 • Harlowe only used 8 monkeys and tested it once, thus making it unreliable as it needs a

larger group size and to be tested 3.

• Results in lab don’t always correlate to the outside world.

Criticism:

Harlow's experiment of attachment on rhesus monkeys has been criticized on a number of

grounds. For example, in terms of ethics and harm to the participants. Following the monkeys

used into adulthood, results showed the long terms effect of their participation particularly when

looking at how they behaved as mothers themselves. The monkeys were both aggressive and

neglected their young often leading to their death.

 Bobo doll Experiment

Aim: To investigate if social behaviors can be acquired by observation and imitation.

Method: Experimental and qualitative

Variables:

Independent variable - whether the children were exposed to an aggressive or passive role model.

Dependent variable - the level of aggression displayed by the child towards the Bobo doll.

Design:

Experimental design

Sample:

The participants for the experiment were 36 boys and 36 girls enrolled at the Stanford University

Nursery School. The children ranged in age between 3 and almost 6 years, and the average

participant age was 4 years 4 months.

Procedure:

There were a total of eight experimental groups. Out of these participants, 24 were assigned to a

control group that would not be exposed to adult models. The rest of the children were then

divided into two groups of 24 participants each. One of the experimental groups would be

exposed to aggressive models, while the other 24 children would be exposed to non-aggressive

models.

Before conducting the experiment, Bandura also assessed the children's existing levels of

aggression. Groups were then matched equally so that they had average levels of aggression.
The child was first brought into a playroom where there were a number of different activities to

explore. The experimenter then invited an adult model into the playroom and encouraged the

model to sit at a table across the room from the child that had similar activities. Over a ten

minute period, the adult models began to play with sets of tinker toys. In the non-aggressive

condition, the adult model simply played with the toys and ignored the Bobo doll for the entire

period. In the aggressive model condition, however, the adult models would violently attack the

Bobo doll. After the ten-minute exposure to the adult model, each child was then taken to

another room that contained a number of appealing toys including a doll set, fire engine, and toy

airplane. The children were permitted to play for a brief two minutes, then told they were no

longer allowed to play with any of these tempting toys. The purpose of this was to build up

frustration levels among the young participants.

Finally, each child was taken to the last experimental room. This room contained a number of

"aggressive" toys including a mallet, a tether ball with a face painted on it, dart guns, and, of

course, a Bobo doll. The room also included several "non-aggressive" toys including crayons,

paper, dolls, plastic animals, and trucks.

Each child was then allowed to play in this room for a period of 20 minutes. During this time

raters observed the child's behavior from behind a one-way mirror and judged each child's levels

of aggression.

Result:

The results indicated that while children of both genders in the non-aggressive group did tend to

exhibit less aggression than the control group, boys who had observed an opposite-sex model

behave non-aggressively were more likely than those in the control group to engage in violence.
Children exposed to the violent model tended to imitate the exact behavior they had observed

when the adult was no longer present.

Conclusion:

Bobo doll experiment demonstrated that children are able to learn social behavior such as

aggression through the process of observation learning, through watching the behavior of another

person. The findings support Bandura's (1977) Social Learning Theory.

Criticism:

Acting violently toward a doll is a lot different than displaying aggression or violence against

another human being in a real-world setting. Because the experiment took place in a lab setting,

some critics suggest that results observed in this type of location may not be indicative of what

takes place in the real world. It has also been suggested that children were not actually motivated

to display aggression when they hit the Bobo doll; instead, they may have simply been trying to

please the adults. Since data was collected immediately, it is also difficult to know what the long-

term impact might have been. Some critics argue that the study itself was unethical. By

manipulating the children into behaving aggressively, they argue, the experimenters were

essentially teaching the children to be aggressive. The study might suffer from selection bias. All

participants were drawn from a narrow pool of students who share the same racial and

socioeconomic background. This makes it difficult to generalize the results to a larger, more

diverse population.
 Asch conformity experiment

Aim: To demonstrate the power of conformity in groups.

Method: Groups of eight male college students participated in a simple "perceptual" task. In

reality, all but one of the participants were actors, and the true focus of the study was about how

the remaining participant would react to the actors' behavior.

Groups of eight male college students participated in a simple "perceptual" task. In reality, all but

one of the participants were actors, and the true focus of the study was about how the remaining

participant would react to the actors' behavior.

Variables:

Independent variable:

• The amount of group pressure

• The size of the majority group

• Whether the wrong answer was given unanimously

• The pressure of the correct people

Dependent variable:

• How much the participants conformed

• The number of traits in which the participant confronted

• The percent of overall participant confronted

Control group:
Students who were not exposed to pressure of conforming to majority group. The control group

consisted If those who were involved in this experiment, fake participants.

Design:

Experimental design

Sample Group:

Subject who participated in vision test and was subjected to see if they confirmed to pressures in

a group. 50 male students from Swarthmore college in USA. Each trial consisted of seven afke

participants and one real participant.

Procedure:

Using a line judgment task, Asch put a naive participant in a room with seven

confederates/stooges. The confederates had agreed in advance what their responses would be

when presented with the line task. The real participant did not know this and was led to believe

that the other seven confederates/stooges were also real participants like themselves. Each person

in the room had to state aloud which comparison line (A, B or C) was most like the target line.

The answer was always obvious. The real participant sat at the end of the row and gave his or

her answer last. There were 18 trials in total, and the confederates gave the wrong answer on 12

trials (called the critical trials). Asch was interested to see if the real participant would conform

to the majority view. Asch's experiment also had a control condition where there were no

confederates, only a "real participant."

Result:
On average, about one third (32%) of the participants who were placed in this situation went

along and conformed with the clearly incorrect majority on the critical trials. Over the 12 critical

trials, about 75% of participants conformed at least once, and 25% of participants never

conformed. In the control group, with no pressure to conform to confederates, less than 1% of

participants gave the wrong answer.

Conclusion

Most of them said that they did not really believe their conforming answers, but had gone along

with the group for fear of being ridiculed or thought "peculiar. A few of them said that they

really did believe the group's answers were correct. Apparently, people conform for two main

reasons: because they want to fit in with the group (normative influence) and because they

believe the group is better informed than they are (informational influence).

Criticism:

One of the major criticisms of Asch's conformity experiments centers on the reasons why

participants choose to conform. According to some critics, individuals may have actually been

motivated to avoid conflict, rather than an actual desire to conform to the rest of the group.

Another criticism is that the results of the experiment in the lab may not generalize to real-world

situations. Many social psychology experts believe that while real-world situations may not be as

clear-cut as they are in the lab, the actual social pressure to conform is probably much greater,

which can dramatically increase conformist behaviors.