• Question: In Harlows Monkey Experiment it talks about the possession and comfort that a mother can withold and this is why babys love to stay around their mothers. So as this experiment provided this information, do you think that this is the reason children and teenagers enjoy being on there phones? is it for the comfort that they bring and the possession?

    Asked by anon-215904 to Laura, Kathryn, Ian, Chris, Bogdana, Alex on 17 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Alex Lloyd

      Alex Lloyd answered on 17 Jun 2019:

      We can’t make the link between comfort and phones without experimental testing. I don’t know of any studies that have done this yet, which means that there is a gap in our understanding of this issue. How would you test this research question?

    • Photo: Ian Cookson

      Ian Cookson answered on 17 Jun 2019:

      Alex makes a good point about there being a gap in the research. Research into mobile phone use in adolescents has focussed on the neagtive effects such as poor sleep patterns, depression, anxiety and isolation. However, Harlow’s experiments were about attachment and parenting styles, so the parent that withholds love and comfort is classed as detached. I think the ownership of phones, in terms of possession is a different thing, but the comfort may be a result of comfort lacking elsewhere.

    • Photo: Bogdana Huma

      Bogdana Huma answered on 17 Jun 2019:

      To venture a guess, based on what we already know from the psychology of child development I would say no.

      In Harlow’s experiment, the monkeys where very young and their attachment response was based mainly on their instincts. By contrast, in children and teenagers, using phones is a learned behaviour, it is not instinctual. So the two behaviours are qualitatively different.

    • Photo: Laura Fisk

      Laura Fisk answered on 17 Jun 2019:

      I love how creative this question is. Like the other psychologists have hinted, there are all kinds of consequences and effects to using mobile phones and why they’re used by people (I’d say not just teenagers!) so much. My first hypothesis as to why teens and children use their phones so much would be in terms of habit and reward – they give imediate feedback, but not at a predictable rate (e.g .through notifications)- which is the perfect combination for making something addictive. That’s mostly from the behavioural- and neuropsychology fields. Another hypothesis I would have had is from the social psychology field and the need to belong – ‘fear of missing out’ and having to belong to a group are both massive pressures for humans, and particularly teenaers in the middle of building their identities. So that’s the kind of research I was thinking about at first…
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      But your suggestion makes an interesting hypothesis – like Alex and Ian suggest, sounds like an experiment is in the making! I would be thinking of drawing from attachment research, and there might e an assumotion (that would need testing) that the main type of activit teenagers are engaging i are to do with social connectedness and (somehow) showing that this is linked to comfort (so you’d need a definition of ‘comfort’). There are old schol ideas about physical objects being able to ‘stand in for’ other, less tangible (touchable) obects like ‘mother’ or ‘love’ or ‘home’ (so like children who take their teddy bear into nursery are taking a bit of home into nursery with them as a reminder that home still exists even though you can’t see it at the moment. In time the child learns to ‘internalise’ that feeling so they ‘just know’ home is still there at the end of the day).
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      Oooh… you’ve really got me thinking – definitely need to get that idea tested!

    • Photo: Chris Fullwood

      Chris Fullwood answered on 21 Jun 2019:

      I think there is something to say about phones bringing us comfort, but I’m not sure if we can necessarily trace that back to our bonds with our parents in early life. I’ve published a paper where we looked at people’s experiences and attitudes to their phones and we did find that people relied on their phones quite heavily as a ‘comfort blanket’ when they were in new and unfamiliar surroundings, perhaps because it helps them to shut out the outside world or perhaps just because they can do something pleasurable on their phones which helps to reduce levels of stress and anxiety

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