If we put a baby in a blank white room and found a way to keep it alive without any interaction with it for 80 years, what would be the outcome? This question was originally posted on Quora.com and was answered by Dr.Paul Mainwood. In the 1970s, an experimenter named Harry Harlow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison tried something similar to this with baby rhesus monkeys. His work is now often referred to as the “Pit of despair” experiments after the tiny stainless steel boxes he used. They had walls, food, water and a roof that sloped like a pyramid, so the monkeys could not climb. Nothing else. Some of the monkeys that he kept in these things were a few months old, and had already developed social bonds with their mothers and others. Some were put in younger — just after birth. The shortest time the monkeys were kept in these things was thirty days, and this was enough to make enormous and terrible changes to their behaviour. A few were kept in them for a year. Almost all soon huddled in the corner of their cages and stayed there. After release, they did not react to the presence of other monkeys, did not join in any social activities, and could not mate. Two simply starved themselves to death. Harlow was also interested in the maternal behaviour of monkeys kept in these conditions. These were equally horrific. Most showed no interest in their children. Some were more violent: one gnawed off her child’s fingers and toes; another crushed her child’s skull. After release from their “pit of despair”, Harlow and his students tried various therapies to see if they could bring the monkeys back to normal behaviour. Some recovered a little. Most did not. These results appear fairly unsurprising: an intelligent, social animal can be damaged up to and beyond utter collapse by the deprivation of sensory stimulus and company of any kind. It seems pretty clear that a human child would fare similarly, and (I hope) there’s no one who would even consider checking such a dull result. Even with monkeys, the suffering in the “pit of despair” experiments was such that Harry Harlow’s motivations for doing the experiments are now the focus of as much interest as the results of the experiments themselves, and Harlow — while well-cited in psychological literature — remains a divisive figure.
