From isolation to attachment: The Study behind Punch the monkey's comfort plushie

The internet’s latest animal obsession — the baby macaque monkey Punch, has undeniably stolen all of our hearts. Abandoned by his mother and bullied by his troop at the Ichikawa City Zoo in Japan, zookeepers gave Punch an IKEA plush monkey as a substitute mother.

In videos of Punch, we can see him cuddling, grooming, and playing with his toy companion. Punch’s devotion to his artificial mother isn’t just a tragic story, but reflects the realities of a famous psychology experiment conducted in the 1950s by researcher Harry Harlow.

The experiment was based on attachment theory, which emphasizes the bond between parent and child in child development. Attachment theory countered the prevailing theory at the time, behaviouralism, which suggested that primates (including human infants) formed an attachment to whoever fulfilled their biological needs.

In the study, Harlow removed rhesus monkeys from their mothers at birth, raising them in an enclosure containing two surrogate “mothers”: one, a wire monkey-shaped cage, which provided food and water via a feeder, and the other, a monkey-shaped doll wrapped in soft terry cloth. In essence, the subjects could choose the object that nourished them, or that which comforted them. It is important to note that scientific community now recognises the cruelty of Harlow’s experiment.

As Harlow expected, the monkeys spent significantly more time attached to the terry cloth “mother”, illustrating that attachment is not created out of mere biological nourishment. By questioning behaviouralists, Harlow demonstrated that when given the chance, love and comfort were chosen over physical nourishment.

Punch’s situation was not part of an artificial study, but rather an unfortunate situation that highlights Harlow’s controlled experiment, as his experience mirrors Harlow’s conclusions. While we cannot neglect the fact that Punch was given sufficient nourishment by caring human caregivers in the zoo, it is clear that he formed a special bond with an inanimate, soft “surrogate mother”. So, next time you spot the sweet monkey on your feed, think about the lessons we have learned from a brutal psychological experiment.