A Dark Experiment On Extreme Isolation

Back in 1965, almost half a century ago, cognitive psychologist Harry Harlow conducted a series of dark experiments on social isolation. Since for obvious he couldn’t use human subjects for his research, he instead used our close relatives, rhesus macaque monkeys.

Harlow placed the monkey infants, hours after they were born, in isolated cages which were later named as “pit of despair”. For, 3, 6, or 12 months, depending on the experiment, the infants had no visual contact with any other being. Their cages were constantly illuminated and white noise was used to cover the voices of the research team and the other infants in the nearby cages. A control group of monkeys was kept in semi-isolated cages, where they had visual and acoustic contact with other monkeys in the adjacent cages.

To examine whether extreme isolation had altered the behavior of the monkeys, Harlow and his team placed isolated and semi-isolated monkeys in a playroom and observed them closely. The results were striking.

After release from total isolation, a monkey refused to eat or drink and eventually died after a couple of days. Another one had to be force-fed to survive. The rest were in a state of shock, “characterized by the autistic self-clutching and rocking”, as Harlow wrote on the paper he published. They had little interest in contact play, and if this did happen, it was after many weeks, and isolated would only play with other isolated monkeys, not with controls. The monkeys that were isolated for 12 months, were socially damaged permanently and never showed any interest in playing. After a while, the bullying by controls towards isolated monkeys was so intense that scientists had to terminate the experiment.

Further tests were conducted. In a series of learning tasks, isolated monkeys proved to have worse performance than the semi-isolated ones, even though their performance was partially improved after a while, providing the monkeys were not in isolation anymore. Also, nearly all of them exhibited no sex behavior, while some showed extreme fear towards adult monkeys.

Even though Harlow terminated the experiment after 12 months and proved that the social damage is irreversible, many people are held in solitary confinement, in a cell like the "pit of despair", for years, sometimes even for decades. It's disturbing thinking about how much extreme isolation has harmed them permanently, and even more disturbing that prison officials continue placing people in solitary even though they are well aware of its effect on social animals, like us, humans.

Harlow, Harry F., Robert O. Dodsworth, and Margaret K. Harlow. "Total Social Isolation in Monkeys." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 54, no. 1 (1965): 90-97. Accessed February 18, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/72996.

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