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The Doll Experiment

Decent Essays

Interestingly, female infant monkeys that did not grew up with biological mother had abnormal maternal behavior in adulthood (Schultheis, 1999). When female monkeys—grew up with surrogate mother—gave birth to their baby, they show neglectful or abusive behavior towards to them. Baby monkeys were not receiving comfort, warmth, or nurturing. Many of them were just be neglected as if they were not exist. Abusive female monkeys were committing physical harm to their baby. Unfortunately, many of infant monkeys from abusive motherless mothers lost their lives.
Harry Harlow’s research through primates have shown psychology field that how important love, nurture, and comfort is for child development. Also, Baumrind and Harlow contributed specific …show more content…

Board of Education court case. One of two research was the doll experiment. Prior to experiment description, Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark (1947) stated on their paper, “The specific problem of this study is an analysis of the genesis and development of racial identification as a function of ego development and self-awareness in Negro children.” (p. 169). Procedure included four dolls that were very identical except the skin color. Two of the dolls had black hair and brown skin and other two were yellow hair with white skin. Other than racial identifiable details, all four dolls were wearing only diapers and it had all same body parts (e.g. head, hands, and legs). Thus, selected participants were 250 African-American children from Northern and Southern part within United …show more content…

First, the result of racial identification displayed that majority of children were able to identify color doll as colored doll and African-American doll and white doll as white (p. 170). These results indicated children’s concept of understanding racial difference and physical skin color were intact in their mental set. Second, age difference by observing results in children age seven to thirteen were evidence of a knowledge of “racial differences” (p. 171). Third, there was not a significant different displayed between northern and southern children. Fourth, result analyzed about racial preferences indicated that majority of African-American children favorited white doll instead of brown doll. Also, they responded that white dolls were “nice” and brown dolls were the “bad” ones (p.

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