The Learning Theory offers many different ideas on how attachment behaviours could be formed however one problem with the Learning Theory is that it is mainly built on studies made no non-human animals. Human behaviours is more influenced by higher order thinking and emotions although some animal behaviours are similar to human ones the test lacked validity because they used results from over simplified examples of human behaviour. However behaviourists disagreed with the problem claiming we are no different from animals and we use the same simple building blocks of stimulus and response and so believed it is legitimate to base animal experiences on human behaviour.
The Learning Theory is useful to some extent because it provides an adequate explanation of how attachments form. The Learning Theory is clear evidence that we do learn through association and reinforcement. However the Learning Theory is only focused on one explanation on how attachments are formed. The Learning Theory doesn’t take into account that we may also create attachments through attention an responsiveness from a caregiver. These are examples of other rewards a baby may crave from the caregiver which are not features in the Learning Theory.
Harry Harlow challenged the Learning Theory stating evidence that feeding has nothing to do with attachments. Harlow noticed that monkeys kept in cages showed signs of distress when they were cleaned out. The cages had ‘sanitary pads’ in them and Harlow thought they became attached to these as a type of ‘security blanket’. Harlow believed it was contact comfort rather than food that formed an attachment. Harlow took two wire mother monkeys and with one, they were offered food and with another they were offered comfort from the mothers clothing. Harlow found that they went to the clothed mother more especially when frightened. Harlow believed this showed another sign of an attachment called a proximity seeking behaviour. Harlow was criticised about the validity of his research because he only tested two types of attachment if he disagreed with the learning theory he should have researched a number of different attachments. Harlow also made a vague evaluation saying that they went to the clothed mother when scared. This doesn’t stop the fact that they went to the mother with food when hungry. Harlow was also criticised because of the ethics of this experiment. Harlow used monkeys that were kept in cages and out through many tormenting trials to see which mother they would go to. Harlow did experiments of cage fear and manipulated events which could have a lasting affect on the monkey. A key point is that Harlow separated the monkeys from their parents and put them in a cage. This may affect the monkeys’ behaviour, making the experiment invalid. Also the surrogate mother models were not suitable substitute mothers, because it could be hard for a monkey to spend most of its time with a wire mesh, because it may be uncomfortable to cling to, and just because the monkey would rather cling to a 'cloth mother' than stay with the food, which the monkey was aware was attached and could not be removed, does not mean that the food is any less important to the monkey than the contact comforts of the 'cloth mother'. A limitation of the Harlow study is that it was not carried out on human babies therefore we can’t be sure that we can extrapolate the findings to humans as it may be a generalised and simplified look at human attachments. However a study by Shaffer and Emerson seemed to support the Harlow study. Shaffer and Emerson observed 60 babies from mainly working class homes in Glasgow for a period of about a year. There were four weekly observations by the researchers for 12 months and the mothers kept a record too. They found out that infants were not attached to the person who fed them but to the person who offered them comfort and who was most responsive and interacted most with the child. This shows that there is more to attachments than just 'cupboard love'. Shaffer and Emerson provided a lot of support for the Harlow experiment and showed evidence that ‘cupboard love’ is not the best explanation of attachment, although association and reinforcement may be involved.
However in this study they only used 60 babies, which isn't enough to generalise, and it was only 23 babies out of 60, which weren't attached to their main caregivers, which isn't large enough not to be a coincidence, and could be caused due to their already upbringing, where they main care givers does not supply them with enough.
Also during Shaffer and Emerson’s experiment the mother’s had to record their finding and results which may be inaccurate as the experiment was carried out in a normal environment over a long period, the mothers had to live their lives normally. However this could be seen as good ecological validity because it was carried out in the setting of the babies own home meaning there were few ethical issues and the children were not subjected to stress in strange situations.
Finally, it would seem highly unlikely that instinct has nothing to do with the formation of attachments. This had been the alternative explanation provided by Bowlby called the Evolutionary theory or the Monotropy theory which looks at attachments as innate and how they affect the future of the child.
