Elephants on Acid (22 page)

Skinner always blamed this one editorial change for the public reaction that followed. No matter how much he later tried to convince people of the benefits of his invention—how much time it would save the mother and how much more comfortable it would make the baby—their reaction consistently remained the same: “You’ve put a baby in a box!” One angry reader wrote in to a local paper saying, “It is the most ridiculous, crazy invention ever heard of. Caging this baby up like an animal, just to relieve the Mother of a little more work.” An entire high school English class wrote directly to Skinner to inform him that “by creating this ‘revolutionary product,’ you have shown that you are ready to inaugurate a society composed of box-raised vegetables similar to the
Brave New World
of Aldous Huxley.” Another critic charitably compared the baby tender to a quick-freeze display case.

The idea that the baby tender was some kind of giant Skinner Box designed to behaviorally condition babies took root. Skinner conceded that, given the similarity between the terms Baby Box and Skinner Box, “it was natural to suppose that we were experimenting on our daughter as if she were a rat or pigeon.” But this was not the case. In fact, Deborah’s time in the baby tender was more of a trial run than an experiment. Skinner did hope to conduct a formal experiment in which he would compare ten babies raised in the baby tender to ten babies raised in normal cribs, but this study never happened.

The perception of Deborah as the unwitting subject of a human Skinner Box experiment inspired a series of urban legends that surfaced during the 1950s and ’60s. According to these rumors, as an adult Deborah became psychotic, sued her father, and committed suicide. In reality, Deborah grew up quite normal and became a successful London-based artist. Though intriguingly, as art critics have noted, her paintings “appear to represent visions seen through ‘glass prisms’—perhaps reflections reminiscent of infant window views.”

Not all reactions to the baby tender were negative. A small community of enthusiasts embraced the concept. But in the words of one General Mills engineer whom Skinner approached about producing a commercial version of the device, these supporters tended to be “long-haired people and cold-hearted scientists.” This wasn’t a demographic General Mills was interested in selling to.

Skinner eventually worked out a manufacturing deal with a Cleveland businessman, J. Weston Judd, who had the inspired idea of marketing the baby tenders as “Heir Conditioners.” But Judd turned out to be a con artist who failed to deliver any product and then skipped town with five hundred dollars Skinner had loaned him. In the 1950s an engineer, John Gray, next took up the thankless job of selling baby tenders. He came up with a better name—Air Crib—and actually sold a few hundred units. But when Gray died in 1967, the Air Crib industry died with him. Unless you strike it lucky on eBay, you’ll be hard-pressed to get your hands on an Air Crib today.

Ultimately the baby tender was a decent (or, at least, harmless) idea that suffered from a serious image problem. As proof of the basic soundness of the concept, Skinner’s advocates point to the hundreds of healthy, sane people who were raised in the devices. But the public remained uncomfortable with
⁵⁵
the notion of enclosing a child in a box. Perhaps people simply were concerned that, in such a highly engineered environment, a kid would grow up too square.

“If you continue to be naughty I shall have to go away, and leave you and send home a new mother with glass eyes and a wooden tail.”

So an exasperated mother warns her children in Lucy Clifford’s short story “The New Mother,” first published in 1882. As Clifford was a writer of dark, gothic fairy tales, her readers knew what to expect. The children keep misbehaving, until the mother sadly packs her bags and departs. Hours later the new mother arrives, announcing her presence with a terrible knocking on the door. The frightened children peer out the window and see her long bony arms and the flashing of her two glass eyes. Then with a blow of her wooden tail, the new mother smashes down the door. Shrieking with terror, the children flee into the forest, where they spend the rest of their lives sleeping on the ground among dead leaves and feeding on wild blackberries, never to return home. That’s what they get for being naughty.

Clifford’s story sends chills down readers’ spines today, over a century after it was written, because it taps into such primal emotions. It takes the image of the mother—the ultimate symbol of love and security—and transforms it into a mechanical terror. The same juxtaposition is what made Harry Harlow’s cloth-mother experiments such a sensation when he conducted them in the 1950s, and why they continue to fascinate the public today.

Harlow was a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin. He was interested in the nature of love, specifically the love of an infant for its mother. The prevailing psychological wisdom was that love was an overrated and certainly unscientific concept. Psychologists dismissively explained that an infant wanted to be close to its mother simply because she provided milk. That’s all love was—an effort to reduce hunger pangs. The same John Watson who terrified Little Albert even warned parents that too much cuddling could warp children’s characters, making them whiny and fearful.

Harlow thought this was hogwash. He was sure love was about more than hunger. While raising infant rhesus monkeys at his lab, Harlow had noticed that the tiny primates craved—and seemed to draw strength from—physical contact with their mothers. If separated from their mothers, they would bond with substitutes, lovingly embracing the soft cloth rags used to line the bottom of their cages, in the same way human children become attached to cuddly toy animals and dolls. It seemed to be a drive as strong as hunger.

Harlow decided to test the claim that love is just a desire for milk. He separated infant monkeys from their mothers at birth and put them in a cage with two surrogate mothers of his own design. He called the first surrogate “cloth mother.” She was a block of wood wrapped in rubber, sponge, and terry cloth and warmed by a lightbulb. She was, Harlow enthused, “a mother, soft, warm, and tender, a mother with infinite patience, a mother available twenty-four hours a day, a mother that never scolded her infant and never struck or bit her baby in anger.” However, she provided no milk. All she could offer was a warm, soft surface to cuddle against.

The second surrogate was a “wire-mesh mother.” Her steel-wire frame wasn’t cuddly at all, but she did supply milk.

Would the infants go for cuddles or for food? Harlow carefully recorded the amount of time the babies spent with each mother, but it soon became apparent that, in the eyes of the monkeys, there was no doubt which mother was better. They spent almost all their time snuggling with cloth mother, only suckling at wire-mesh mother’s teat for a few brief seconds before frantically running back to the security of cloth mother. Clearly, these babies cared more about cuddling than about nourishment.

This experiment demolished in one fell swoop decades of psychological dogma. But Harlow wasn’t finished.

Although the infants clung desperately to cloth mother, she clearly wasn’t a great parent. Her babies grew up strange—timid and antisocial. They cowered in corners and shrieked as people walked by. Other monkeys shunned them. Wire-mesh-mothered monkeys fared even worse. Harlow realized his surrogate mothers still lacked essential features. He set out to determine scientifically what these might be. What were the significant variables in the relationship between a child and its mother?

He began with texture. He wrapped his surrogate mothers in different materials—terry cloth, rayon, vinyl (which he called the “linoleum lover”), and rough-grade sandpaper. The infants definitely preferred the terry cloth mother and showed more self-confidence in her presence. So Harlow concluded that a good mother must be soft.

Next he investigated temperature. He created “hot mamma” and “cold mamma.” Hot mamma had heated coils in her body that raised her temperature. Chilled tubes of water ran through cold mamma. As far as the monkeys were concerned, cold mamma might as well have been dead. They avoided her at all costs. Conclusion—a good mother must be warm.

Finally, Harlow examined motion. Real mothers are always walking around or swinging from trees. To simulate this, he came up with “swinging mom.” Swinging mom, hung from a frame like a punching bag, dangled two inches off the floor. Harlow quipped, “There is nothing original in this day and age about a swinger becoming a mother, and the only new angle, if any, is a mother becoming a swinger.” Surprisingly, the monkeys loved swinging mom best of all. And under her care, they grew up to be remarkably well adjusted—or as well adjusted as could be expected for a child who has a swinging cloth bag for a mother. So the final tally was that good mothers must be soft, be warm, and
move
.

William Mason, who worked for a while in Harlow’s lab after obtaining his Ph.D. from Stanford, later extended this work and came up with the perfect surrogate mother for a baby monkey. She fit all the criteria. She was soft and warm, and moved. She also happened to be a mongrel dog. Mason’s dog-raised monkeys turned out strikingly normal. They were bright, alert, and happy little creatures, though perhaps slightly confused about their identity. Remarkably, the dogs didn’t seem to mind the little monkeys hanging off them.

Harlow’s work then took a darker turn. Having determined the qualities that fortify the love between a baby and its mother, he set out to discover whether these bonds of love could easily be broken. He wanted to create a parallel to human children who experience poor parenting, to help unravel some of the resultant problems. So he created
⁵⁶
mothers that inflicted various forms of abuse on the babies. There was shaking mom (who at times shook so hard she flung her infant across the room), air-blast mom (who occasionally blasted her babies with violent jets of compressed air), and brass-spike mom (from whom blunt brass spikes periodically emerged). Whatever cruelties these mothers dealt out, their babies would simply pick themselves up and crawl back for more. All was forgiven. Their love could not be shaken, dented, or air-blasted away. Very few infant monkeys were involved in these tests, but the results were clear.

It’s worth noting that although Harlow did identify some of the qualities a competent mother should have, his surrogates reliably failed the ultimate test. An infant monkey would never, ever have chosen one of them over a living, breathing female of its own species. Which shows that, when it comes to motherly love, there is no substitute for the real thing.

The squad car speeds down the street, sirens wailing, in hot pursuit of a criminal. It rounds a corner, and suddenly, just yards ahead, a person is crossing the street and—OH MY GOD!—she’s pushing a baby stroller! The cop jams on the brakes and twists the wheel sideways. Tires squeal. Rubber skids against the tarmac. The car veers up onto the curb, hits a fire hydrant, and slams into the side of a building. Water sprays everywhere. But the stroller and its occupant are untouched. Inside the car, the cops breathe a sigh of relief. The criminal, however, is long gone.

Hollywood car chase scenes have taught us that people will go to great lengths to avoid hitting a baby stroller—far greater lengths, it seems, than they’ll go to avoid running over an adult. Is this true? Are drivers in real life more careful to avoid baby strollers than they are to avoid grownups?

In 1978 researchers at UCLA put this idea to an experimental test. At a busy four-lane street in Los Angeles, a young female experimenter stepped out into the crosswalk and waited for cars to stop so she could proceed across. She either stepped out alone, pushing a shopping cart, or pushing a baby stroller. An observer counted the number of cars that passed in each situation before a driver stopped for her.

Thankfully, the researchers didn’t put a real baby in danger. The stroller was empty, and drivers could easily see this. But the researchers believed this wouldn’t matter. They hypothesized that the mere presence of a stroller would encourage drivers to stop more readily.

They were right. When the experimenter stood alone, an average of almost five cars drove by before one stopped. In the shopping-cart condition, the average was three cars. But with a baby stroller in front of her, the number of passing cars dropped to one.

The researchers theorized that drivers stopped sooner for the stroller because babies—and, by extension, all things baby related—act as anger inhibitors. They trigger nonviolent, courteous impulses in people. Strong taboos against harming small children exist in all cultures. Even monkeys share this sentiment. If male monkeys want to avoid being attacked, they often sidle up to infants.

Intriguingly, the researchers stumbled upon a parallel phenomenon during the course of their experiment. They
⁵⁷
noticed that when the woman was standing alone, certain types of drivers stopped far more readily than others:

Young male drivers, in particular, seemed more inclined to stop for the attractive female experimenter when she was without the baby stroller (and in a few instances to actually try and converse with her). It would be desirable in future research to replicate the present findings with other pedestrians such as older men.

So perhaps we should add a corollary to the observation that people stop more readily for babies. They also stop frequently for babes.

You see them at playgrounds, chasing after children, camera in hand. Or at restaurants, filming away as an infant hurls food on the floor. They’re proud parents, determined to preserve for posterity every moment of their kid’s childhood—his first step, his first bite of carrots, his first inarticulate gurgle. Later these archived memories will be sprung on guests who thought they had been invited over for a no-strings-attached dinner.