Attachment Theory

Appendix A

John Bowlby's 44 Thieves Study

 

 In 1944 John Bowlby carried out an investigation into the long term effects of maternal deprivation in order to test his theories about the attachment relationship between an infant and its mother during the first five years of life.

For the purposes of this study he chose  as his subjects 44 adolescent juvenile delinquents in a child guidance clinic.  He was seeking to learn what disturbance this rupture of a maternal bond had caused to the intellectual, social and emotional development of  these 44 children.  The hypothesis he was testing had been named the Maternal Deprivation Hypothesis and the consequences of this deprivation, that he was seeking to establish, would include delinquency, reduced intelligence, increased aggression, depression, and affectionless psychopathy.

The 44 adolescents were chosen because they had been referred to the clinic as "thieves", i.e. because of stealing.  Bowlby then selected another group of 44 children to act as "controls".  This second group had not been referred because of crime, but because of emotional problems.  Bowlby interviewed not only the children, but also the parents of both groups, to ascertain whether their children had experienced separation during the critical period and the length of such separation.

He ascertained that more than half of the juvenile thieves had been separated from their mothers for longer than six months during their first five years.  In the control group only two had had such a separation.  He also discovered that a third of the thieves were unable to display affection for others (affectionless psychopathy); they lacked concern for others and were unable to form relationships. None of the control group were affectionless psychopaths.  He concluded that the anti-social behaviour and emotional problems in the first group was due to maternal deprivation. 

In a subsequent paper, he stated that 60 children who had spent time apart from their mothers in a tuberculosis sanatorium before the age of 4 showed lower achievement in school than did their peers.

 

CONCLUSION AND CRITICISM

The experiment and the study lent considerable support and credence to Bowlby's development of his Attachment Theory, but depended considerably on the memory of the participants which may have lacked some accuracy.  Also since Bowlby both designed and conducted the study, there may have been some experimenter bias, above all in the diagnosis of affectionless psychopathy.

Furthermore the conclusion that affectionless psychopathy was caused by maternal deprivation ignored other possible variables such as diet, parental income, educational levels, all of which may have affected the behaviour of the 44 thieves, and not solely the disruption of the maternal attachment bond

Some of the other criticisms include:

-  The failure to attach sufficient significance to attachment to other figures than the mother or primary caregiver.  Fathers, siblings, peers and even inanimate objects have been cited as objects of attachment.

-  Some critics have accused Bowlby of failing to distinguish between deprivation and privation, i.e. failure to develop an attachment bond rather than its rupture.

-  Others have suggested that the quality of the attachment bond has not been given sufficient importance.

-  There is also missing the study of such factors as lack of intellectual stimulation and social experiences which attachments normally provide.

-  Many of the 44 thieves had been moved around a lot during childhood, suggesting that they were suffering from privation rather than deprivation, namely that they might never have formed an attachment.

-  But, in apparent support of Bowlby's conclusions, research using monkeys revealed that monkeys reared in isolation from their mother suffered emotional and social problems in older age.  These monkeys never formed an attachment (privation) and as such grew up to be aggressive and had problems interacting with other monkeys.  (Harry Harlow 1958, The Nature of Love).