A theory in the field of psychology has become so pervasive, it’s generally taken on faith that it’s true. It says that how your parents respond to you during a short window in your infancy has lifelong effects on your personality. Could this be correct?
Welcome to Stuff you should know a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there in the past or the future, I can't tell. It's Chuck and Jerry's here hanging out on the ether. And that makes this stuff you should know hanging out in the ether. She's ethereal she's actually on ether too, to really complete the whole circle. Oh boy, I wish I was so um Chuck, surely you've heard of attachment theory before. It's so fully ingrained into pop culture that I would be really surprised if there are many of our listeners out there who aren't at least passingly familiar with it. Yeah. I had heard of it, and it's um. You know. I think this is a very instructive episode for brand new parents because even if you think you kind of know something about it, I learned a lot. Uh, it's you light now because you know, my daughter's seven and a half, so we already screwed up, right. But if you're just starting out with the baby, like, start early, because whatever you do makes a big impact on their adult life. Even Yeah, I think that's one of the things that makes this so interesting, is like you've got a really narrow window to not screw up your kid, and it's it's you. It's on you, like you, the primary caregiver, are responsible for your kids or not, so, says attachment theory. A lot of people question that. A lot of people say humans are way too complex, there's way too many genetic and environmental and social forces working on the individual to shape them. Or but there there does seem to be like a lot of validity to attachment theory, even if it isn't like the thing that forms our personality. Yeah, and I think it's one of those cool things that like, uh and you know, we're going to talk about the history of it, but it seems like kind of almost right away when we started figuring out that there was attachment, there were some people, even though it's gotten way more popular over the years, to sort of look into this stuff, some people kind of really early on, we're like, all right, well, why like let's try and figure this thing out. Yeah, because attachment, um, we should define it. It's basically a bond, an affinity for that an infant has for their caregiver in vice versa typically um and it is seems to be universal that bond, that attachment between baby and caregiver around the world. It just seems to be a human thing. Uh. It also seems to show up in the animal kingdom, especially among other mammals and primates. Um, it is a thing. And like you said, people are like, but why, And they started asking why after Darwin came along. So the framework that everybody was looking at this through was evolution natural selection. And the first kind of dominant explanation for the whole thing, which we'll get into a little more later, was behaviorism. And the upshot of behaviorism as it was as it applies to um, that bond that forms between baby and caregiver, Um is that the baby wants to be fed, and the caregiver feeds the baby. Ergo, the baby feels good about the caregiver. Yeah, and who cares about your emotions? Yeah, we can't study those anyways. Was kind of the prevailing theory. Yeah, that's exactly right. But then along comes a guy and a lady and another guy riding in on their ponies. It was strangely enough. Uh No, it was a guy named John Bowlby. Uh. There was a woman named Mary Ainsworth, and then there was another guy. Uh, named William Blatts will show up later and like we'll talk about them a little more in a second. But Bowlby basically was among a small handful of people who said that whole behaviorist um explanation doesn't hold up because you can feed a baby and the baby will still be crying, the baby will still want the caregiver um, and sometimes a caregiver can sue the baby without any food. So I don't think it's just food that thereafter. I think it's something more, um, intangible, but just as important as food. Yeah, like if your baby scared, it's yeah, it's not all just about that. You know that milk that you're getting, and you know that stuff is important. Like we talked about in the breastfeeding episode. Uh, you know, we covered you know, those kinds of bonds and attachments that can happen from mother to baby, but we also talked about the fact that that's not you know, the end all be all, necessarily right. No, Yeah, definitely milk is important. Food is important, but they're not breastfeeding bond. Sure, oh the bond, sure, I get to yeah, but the so, yeah, that bond in and of its self is what Bowlby and attachment theory says, is the important part of the bond. It's the bond. It bond. The bond isn't like some um you know, byproduct of that need for food and satisfying of the need for food. It is the thing that the kid wants and that the caregiver gives to the kid a bond, a connection, a social connection with another human being that that cares for that little little baby. Um. And that's it almost sounds like on the surface like well, wait, what's the big difference. The differences is the purpose of the bond is emotional, and behaviorism says the purpose of the bond is strictly to manipulate the person to get food. Right, So there is an enormous amount of difference. And they came up at around the same time, and it turned out that attachment theory basically completely supplanted behaviorism, as we'll see. Yeah, I think what's interesting is that, uh, at least in our case, Like right when my daughter was born, she comes out, they're like get in there in that other room and take your shirt off, like mom and dad, and like start putting that skin on skin. They call it skin on skin. Yeah, and that skin on skin contact, they say, is just you know, do it as much as you can, as often as you can, uh, from from the get go, which I guess is part of attachment theory, even though that's a physical bond. I don't know, I really don't know. It didn't come up, so I it's got to have something to do with it. But I didn't see anything like where that skin on skin contact is an important part of attachment. Yeah, I'm kind of curious. I'm meant to look into that. But it's one thing that that's it's a big deal now, you know, whereas in the old days they were like, you know, dad's down the street, you know, in a bar, and eventually you'll meet your child. Yeah, exactly. And that also explains I realized now why you started wearing wide mesh crop top shirts all the time. Just that skin on skin context. Skin to win is our motto. So the upshot of attachment theories, that's everybody that you're a primary caregiver and if you make yourself available, if you're responsive to an infant's needs to be soothed when they're scared, to be fed when they're hungry, to be hut like cuddled, that give them that skin on skin contact. Then the infant learns that they can depend on that, and that gives them a sense of security that in a few years they can use to go explore the rest of the world knowing they have a safe home base. That's attachment theory, and that's not If you don't do that exactly, then it has all sorts of other effects that make the kid not secure from that that time on. Yeah, and you know, a lot of this may seem like uh no dub type of stuff now because we're way more um just sort of in tune with that kind of thing now, in a little more touchy feeling now, So it seems very obvious I think these days. But as you'll see, and a lot of this has to do with how you react, um like when the child may be upset. It wasn't always that way. I mean, we'll you know, we'll touch on it later, but there up until semi recently, there were times where it was like, no, if your child is upset, you know, uh, try and get them to not be upset in any way you can. Maybe that's a punishment, maybe you ignore it. And that was sort of the way, and it's just it's crazy to think about such an obvious thing as like, no, you should provide comfort to an upset kid first and foremost and kind of work out from there. Uh, you know, because I'm not saying there's no like behavioral things you need to address, but uh, it's just really interesting that it took that long to arrive what to me. What to me is like a really kind of obvious thing. Yeah. I wonder though, if this is where we finally progress too, or if behaviorism was a diversion from stuff we've been doing before, which probably for a strong resemblance to attachment theory, you know, yeah, like Tuktok may have been a better parent than dad in the nineteen forties. Yeah, and Bob Dobbs or something. Yeah, exactly. So, um, let's talk about the people who who literally changed the world because you really put your finger on something, something sticky and smelly when you said that, Um, it just seems like no, duh, now, like that is how thoroughly it has completely permeated Western society. Um. And and you can point to John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth is two people who changed the world by by getting attachment theory across and showing like this actually has real legs. Yeah. So Bowlby was a brit Uh. He was a psychiatrist and he was raised he you know, it's pretty clear that he probably had um some kind of money growing up because he was ra is by a host of nanny's uh in England. And uh, it seems like when he got older he was very much into exploring what that meant to him, because he I guess had a memory or at least maybe uncovered some trauma from when he had his main nanny uh split for another job when he was really young. And when you're a little kid, like if if that's your scene growing up, that main nanny, that's like your caregiver. And so it would I would guess be a kin to like mom leaving or something like that. Uh. And this was in like the what like nineteen thirties. So he started exploring that, which was a very I think, kind of forward introspective kind of thing to be thinking about back then. Uh, it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that was innate back then, but he started thinking about his own life and that really informed his his research or his interest in researching it. Yeah, and it makes you wonder if that nanny hadn't left and inspired him to kind of look into the damage that it did. I mean, would we even have attachment theory. It's a it's a big question. May have just had a tougher time because they really it seems worked great in tandem together, right, So um bowlby Uh, he started investigating juvenile delinquents. Um. That was where he started to kind of look for like, if you want to prove a point, go find the extremes and then investigate that, and it's the easiest way to uncover the mechanations of things. So we started looking at juvenile delinquents and basically was like, it's the kids home life that that makes them a delinquent. It's nothing else, Like you can take poverty away, you can take um, you know, rule out all these other factors, and if the home life is stable and supportive, the kids probably not going to be a juvenile delinquent. If it's not, there's a chance the kid will be a juvenile delinquent. So out of the gate, he's already contributing to siety through his research and his theories. Yeah, and I thought it was interesting and that he wasn't necessarily just saying like, good parent, bad parent. He worked at the London Child Guidance Clinic and he was looking and in fact wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal talking about just family separations because of jobs, uh and chiefly world War two. World War two comes along right when he's sort of getting into this, and families all of a sudden are split up, and he hit on a key thing, which is like, hey, that's that's no good to have a parent taken away from a child at an early age. And I don't think he was saying, like, you know, we shouldn't send soldiers to war because uh, their kids are going to be delinquents later, but he was saying this might happen as a result of that. Yeah, and even more than just you know, father's going off to war, like like children were removed from their parents to get them to safer places out in the countryside. Um, if you've ever seen The Lady in Black two, the horror movie that's kind of the premise of it, have yeah a few times. All these little kids are like removed from London where it's very dangerous, but their parents need to stay behind and contribute to the to the war if art working in the factories and yeah, so yeah, of course it's going to have that effect. So he's telling everybody this like, this might not be the best idea, even though the intentions are great. Sorry. And then he moves into the juvenile delinquents. He he had a paper called forty four Juvenile Thieves Their Character and Home Life, And that's when he was like, it's the home life that's that's the problem. Yeah. He took kind of a big swing here because he went all, you know, all the way out on a limb to say like, hey, your kid maybe like a criminal later in life. Uh. And they may be using you know, like stealing material things, maybe a literal substitute or I guess in a little substitute there, I go, a figurative substitute for the fact that they didn't get the love they needed as a kid. Uh. And I think, you know, he I don't think he talked about in this paper. But of course later that could be drug addiction or any sort of bad road you go down. Yeah, And so he followed that up. The World Health Organization, right when the u N starts to be form, basically hired him in nineteen fifty to work on the mental health of homeless children. It is amazing. This guy was a pretty amazing dude, just based on his research right doing this back then, you know, right right, especially when the dominant view was no, these are all little robots, this stuff doesn't matter at all, and he's saying, no, this actually matters a lot. And he came out with a book called Childcare and the Growth of Love. It was basically bait. I know, it's a great title, but it was based on the work and the research that he did for the World Health Organization. But he he very wisely, I get the impression, wrote it for a popular audience and that helped the whole theory gain traction, and the theory he was these juvenile delinquents I've been investigating um that had a bad home life. Well I went and figured out where the whole thing starts, and it starts really early on in infancy, and that it's all about nurturing the child that leads to proper development, and that if you don't nurture the child properly, they're going to be psychologically damaged humans for the rest of their lives. So let's start figuring out how to nurture them properly. Yeah, and I think you kind of hit on it. The key here was it wasn't a scientific paper. This was like, hey, people in the public sphere, let's read this book. Yeah. I think that's a good time for a break. I feel like we could just keep going and just say forget the ads. Sure, let's make it a Christmas special, but maybe we should take a break and then introduce Mary Ainsworth in earnest after that. Huh, agreed? Okay, Chuck, So we're back in It's high time that Mary Ainsworth wrote in on her Palomino and that's a great great reference there. Um, we should say Ed helped us out with this one. And he made a little aside somewhere in this article. I can't remember quite where, but he wanted to point out that he started looking into Mary Ainsworth and expected to find that she was just kind of like the woman working behind the scenes who never really got credit until long after her death. And he said he was very pleasantly surprised to find that Nope, she was viewed as a collaborator of Bowlby's, that they came up with this together, and she was very much lauded within her lifetime like she was she was seen and respected for her work at it, like during the fifties basically, So that's a big deal. I think it's worth mentioning off the bat, absolutely because I feel like we've come up with so many of these stories through the years in research terms, where like the man stamps his name on it and it's like thanks, thanks for the help Mary, exactly, Now go give me some coffee. Yeah exactly. No, that isn't what happened. So Mary Ainsworth moves to London. I don't know she did it to specifically work with Bowlby or not, but she ended up working with him pretty quickly, and she brought with her a theory that had been worked out by someone else she'd worked with. I think he was a bit of a mentor to her. His name was William E. Blatts, and Blats came up with something called security theory, which basically says that if if a kid has security early in life that they can trust in their their caregiver, then they have a foundation for exploration later on in life. And as Ed puts it, it seems like it was a bit of a beta version of attachment theory. It's kind of like attachment theory without the explanation of why or how. Yeah, And it turns out that Mary Ainsworth was really good at UM helping to find out the why because she knew, like, hey, we can sit around and have high tea and theorize all day over here in England. And she said, it's very nice. I enjoy the high tea. It's one of the reasons I moved. Those cucumber sandwiches are dealish, Yeah, finky thinky sandwiches are lovely, But like, we need to do, like we need to try and prove this stuff and do experimentation. And one of the experiments, uh, they ended up working together at Johns Hopkins University, and she developed a very famous experiment called, uh Strange, the Strange Situation Capitalist capitals, And it sounds kind of mean, but it's not as mean as it got and you'll find out, you know, later on that uh, this other character comes in that was kind of a human monster with his experiments. But the strange situation was basically a situation where you had a a kid and their caregiver in a room for twenty one minutes, and over those twenty one minutes, there would be a series of comings and goings of the caregiver and a stranger so like, and there was some overlap here and there, so that the caregiver would be there and then a stranger would enter. And then every time one of them would leave, that was labeled as a conspicuous exit. Whatever that means, I am leaving, I guess so. But and it wasn't like the stranger would come in and just sit there with crossed arms like they It says that the stranger would be like geared towards the child's activities or whatever. So I would like to see it in action, to see what they actually did. But um, it was just a series of comings and goings with the goal to basically kind of see what, you know, how the child reacts in what to their mind might look feel like a crisis, and how strongly they respond to everybody, to the caregiver leaving, to the stranger coming in, to perhaps bonding some with the stranger or not, then the stranger leaving, and then if you're mad when the caregiver comes back because they left, or if you were just super relieved. So there's like all kinds of things you can unpack with the capitals, capitals, strange situation, right, But what she found is that there's really just a few buckets that you can put these responses in, which is really something that means you're onto something when you're like, wow, this is crazy. These kids are acting or responding within one of three or four ways. And um even more important or just as important, I should say, she also did some field work in Uganda, UM studying like infant caregiver bonding, and um found that like, these kids respond in the same way as American kids do, UM in these same four buckets. So she was definitely onto something for sure. Yeah, and that kind of work game super important as far as uh, you know, because it wasn't just like let's just uh explored that what's happening with these American babies, like if they wanted to find out if it was a cross cultural and then eventually drilling down even more to like socio economic and stuff like that. So all just super valuable stuff for sure. So UM, it's like you said, Bowlby came up with the theories, and Ainsworth figured out how to how to explain why those theories did a pretty good job of explaining bonding and attachment right. Um, So just to kind of like get a little further into behaviorism and what they were up against by by coming up with this completely radical new idea of what makes a good human being. Um, they were up against behaviorism. And one of the most famous behaviorists was BF Skinner, And what B. F. Skinner was working on was operant conditioning, which is you take a behavior and you pair it with a consequence. It can be a reward, it can be a punished meant. But depending on whether you want to encourage that behavior or discourage that behavior, you punish it or you reward it. Right, And that means that that behavior then is learned. That's the basis of behavioralism. That it's that these behaviors are learned traits. Uh. And that's not at all what Bulby and Ainsworth were finding. They came to realize or believe that, um, that bonding and attachment was an innate trait, not a learned trait. Right. So, like if you have affection towards someone, it's not there because you need it, but it is just a stimulus basically to further the caregiving. That's the behaviorist viewpoint. Yeah, and you know, Skinner in a skinner Box, which I feel like we've talked to that about that a bunch of times for sure. But the so like these guys were saying like they they turned this behavioristum explanation for bonding um into like child rearing practices and like wrote book and basically said like, if your baby is crying and you pick that baby up and soThe that, you have just reinforced crying behavior and they're going to cry for the rest of their life. So you should probably never approach a crying baby, just ignore them. Basically, Yeah, they almost treated it as if you were like, uh, that that was equivalent to a child having a tantrum later, you know, and this is just it's not the same thing. There is a behavior's named John B. Watson. I think we've spoken about him before to his name is very familiar, but he wrote a parenting book and um a couple of excerpts from it are as follows. He said that you should never hug or kiss your kid or let them sit on your lap. Get this, you should shake hands with them in the morning. Well I agree with that parton if they if they've done an extraordinary good job at some difficult task, then maybe you can give them a pat on the head and then if you must must, then you can kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. This was like the the the interaction that they said, if you do this with your kid, you're gonna produce a good kid, not a um a social deviant monster who And frankly, this fully explains the boomer generation because this is about the time that these kids are being born and raised. Yeah, when was his uh when was Watson around the fifties? This is Yeah, I'd be curious to find out what his h if he had children, how that went. They're still like trembling. I'm guessing they just want that pat on the head when they meet somebody. But I mean imagine that people were like, yeah, that's a great idea. I can shake hands with my kid in the morning, and they're gonna turn out to be aces. They're going to be the toast when they get older. Yeah. No good uh yeah nice nice ref that almost slipped by me. Um. Should we talk about the three sort of buckets, which basically clear the three attachment styles? I think we should all right, Well, the first one is uh, well that it turned out that there were four, but um, thankfully, the fourth is is a very small percentage of infants are exposed to this kind of attachment. But the first is secure and that means you know, you're you're doing great as apparent. That means you're nurturing and you respond. And again a lot of this is what to do when your kid is upset. You're responding with um support and by calming them and by nurturing them rather than you know, doing the Watson method. And again, in turn, I know it sounds like we're beating a dead horse, but that will make the child feel secure. They're gonna feel supported. Uh, They're gonna feel like they're able to express negative emotions. And I think that is a semi modern thing. Is is like negative feelings are okay, Like you're not supposed to get your child to quit crying. You're supposed to say, cry it out, feel those feelings and let's like talk about them, um, and then shake hands afterwards, shake hands. They well done. Here's a cucumber sandwich. Uh. And this is called and organized and they're sort of uh further um described as organized or disorganized. This one is organized. And I think what which is a pretty good number of infants apparently are are brought up and nurtured in this way, right. And also to circle it back, Mary Ainsworth is the one who's like, Okay, there's a lot of kids kids who respond in this way, right. And what she's finding is that in that strange situation test, the secure children will be distressed when their parents leaves and then will be relieved when the parent comes back. They will go to the parent for comfort, and then the parent finds it very easy to calm the child down, comfort them, and then the child goes back to playing with the toys like nothing ever happened. It all just rolled off their back. That that is the that forms that secure attachment, right. Um. And like you said, it's organized because the kid knows that they can go to the parent, the parents canna reassure them, and then it's going to be all good. Yeah, there's like a structure there that even an infant can understand. It's so basic exactly. Um. The next one that she found, I think covers about of infants. It's avoidant and this one is where the caregiver just doesn't really give the kid what they need. And we're talking infants here, right, doesn't like the the the infant is in distress, and the caregiver might just like ignore them, They might get annoyed with them. They might kind of mock the kids distress and like little babelo, what's will that will baby? Or you upset kind of thing, which I mean, I can't imagine how many times I've heard that in my life, like in movies, are on TV, and probably even in real life. And when you step back and realize that you're mocking an infant and you're screwing them up as you do it, well, here's how you screw them up right, and um, in the actual strange situation, Um, the kid is totally normal that you can't really distinguish them from the secure kids until the caregiver leaves and the secure kids member they became distressed. The avoidant kids they're actually like, I'm I'm all good, I'm just gonna keep playing with these Lincoln logs, right, although I think it's a little old for infants, but regardless, And then when the caregiver comes back, they either ignore the caregiver or may actually like go away from the caregiver because what they've learned is that their emotions upset the caregiver. So they have to manage their own emotions and they have to hide them. And that is what the you learn as an infant if you have an avoidant attachment. Yeah, like this, this behavior drives my caregiver away from me, so I have to go into my room to be upset or something. It's sort of just occurring to me reading all this. That how much the story of Popeye the Sailor Man, because to play Popeye when he was an infinct then Peppy wasn't around. Uh, there was a lot of like they had a lot of unpacking to do. He and Pappy, I don't remember that. I just remember him beating people up. Yeah. Pappy was Popeye's dad, and he didn't get the love he needed when he was an infink. Uh. And so that's probably why he was violent huh later in life. Yeah, I mean that makes sense. Although if he had been disorganized, it would have made more sense that he was violent. Uh, it was Popeye organized, I guess, I don't know. I mean I would say he's probably disorganized, had a disorganized attachment because that's the one that's associated with violence. Yeah. I think Pappy was cold. So if Pappy was cold, he probably would have developed avoidance, right yeah, if Pappy was um uh inconsistent, Where Pappy was sometimes like oh it's okay, you know, and reassured little infant Popeye and then other times ignored infant Popeye. Infant Popeye would learn that there was no real way to depend on Pappy and no real way to predict when Pappy was going to respond to Popeye's needs. Right yeah. This inconsistency, this is called the resistant bucket. It almost seems that it does as much damage as uh as the other one. It's like, yeah, yeah, I mean there, I mean this is something I've learned as apparent that like structure, like kids really really count on that, even though they don't know that they count on that because they don't understand it at that point. But like disrupting uh schedule and disrupting a structure UH is very um like it shouldn't be taken lightly, as apparent, even small things. And Emily and I find ourselves all the time still just being like, oh god, you know, we didn't really think about like um, coming back from them by vacation or or just launching back into school like we're parents. We can or adults, we can kind of zig and zag with life, but you can't always count on a kid to be able to do that. Uh. And I think that's sort of um in a way, that that sort of inconsistency playing out, you know as a kid gets older. Right, Yeah, no, totally. And like in this strange situation UM experiment, these kids were distressed even before the parent left, They were distressed while the parent was gone, and then when the parent came back, they might be angry to the parent, they might be um clingy to the parent. And I saw this explained as these kids develop a preoccupation with their attachment. They're they're not sure when their their caretakers going to respond to him, so they can't focus on anything else but whether or not their caretaker is going to respond to them. And they by being clingy there like trying to force the caregiver to respond. They may cry louder than other kids because they're trying to force the caregiver to respond. And that's the ambivalent or resistant attachment style. And yeah, it is. It is a sad way to screw up a kid. It seems like, Yeah, the final one, which is the smallest bucket is the only one that's labeled is disorganized. Even though resistant is pretty chaotic, it's still organized, like you said, but this is And a lot of times they point out that the caregiver in the disorganized case is UM may have a trauma that they suffered. This is sort of like that cycle that repeats itself. Or they may have like some mental health issue or something and are not UM maybe not able to like concentrate on the needs of the kids so or at least consistently. So it's also inconsistent, just like resistant is. But this feels like inconsistent plus right right, It's it's like, um, you may intimidate the kid to up crying. You may yell at the kid to stop crying. I get the impression with an ambivalent resistant kid, the caretakers not yelling at you, are trying to intimidate you. They're just not responding. In some cases this is like really mean stuff. Or they might be inconsistent in that there they choose to soothe, but they're doing it without any real emotion. They're like, oh, it's okay, you're gonna be fine. It's the right kind of thing. And so that kids not getting any right, and they're not getting support. But not only that, their caregiver, the one person who's supposed to be the source of stability in the entire universe for that kid, is a source of fear. And so in the strange situation experiment, kids who had disorganized attachment, they might go to the stranger just as as frequently as they might go to their parents. When they came back, they might run from their parents. They might freeze and not know which person to go to. They might be confused because their caregiver is a source of fear and they but they still have that need, they just don't know where to get it. It's extremely sad um and it is the kind that seems to really lead to serious problems UM early in life and then on into adulthood. You ever do that thing, uh, you know, you me ever do that thing where you put Momo in the middle of you and you stand for apart and you both start calling her. Yeah, I don't think either one of us could bear to know that we weren't the one. But I know pretty well that she would go to human. She wouldn't be happy about it, but she would go to UM. That's sad Um, I don't know why people would do that, but I've seen that done on the internet. Probably is a joke, Like, surely no one would do that and put any like stock in it. Speaking of a joke, you showed me this. There was this meme recently. Um, although this comes out in a couple of weeks, so this meme will probably be ancient by then. But there's a trend I think on TikTok where kids, um fake re being the news that their parents favorite celebrity has died, and then they they tape it and like, oh man, I can understand being upset about it because it's just like really emotionally abusive. But at the same time, if you watch like a highlight reel of some of the some of the more pronounced responses, it's it's tough not to crack up. I haven't seen any of them. I just solved that some celebrities are like pretty ticked off about it. Why would the celebrities be ticked off? I don't know our celebrities ever ticked off. I don't know celebrities who needs them. Remember that point at the very beginning of the pandemic where we almost got rid of celebrities. Do you remember when everybody was so sick of celebrities? There was that whole gal Goodo screwed up about singing. Imagine Madonna in the bath with Rose Pedal talking about how everybody's equal and everybody was just kind of sick and tired of celebrities right then, and it seemed like we were gonna shed our our fascination with them. It just didn't pan out. Good luck. Yeah, right, all right, we should probably take our second break, uh, and then we'll talk about you know, we mentioned testing these theories, and there's more to it than just the capital est capitalist strange situation. So we'll be back right after this to talk about testing. All right. When it comes to testing these kind of a lot of psychological testing, but especially this, it's pretty tough because in order to get like a robust test, we've talked about it over and over, you need to be able to repeat stuff. You need to be able to have large sample sizes. Uh, and it's really tough in this case because, uh, it's hard to get you know, when you're studying humans like this, and especially this kind of thing where you study infinite attachment, and then you want to know what they're like later in life. This is really long drawn out studies over years and years, even decades, and it's hard to get like a large sample size. So right out of the gate, your longevity is hampered, your sample size is hampered. And then the other big knock is it's really impossible to not uh think about the variables that might come up that would also influence uh the outcomes, which in this case, it's like it's almost an infinite list of variables that could affect uh, these kinds of studies. Yeah, like are you going to screen the study participants for um, you know, genetic traits that you are going to try to control for or whether there's lead paint in their home. Um. There's just so much stuff, And it also is based on how complex humans are, how many influences we have. But the upshot of it is is that attachment theory has been the dominant explanation for UM, how little baby personalities are formed, uh and how we kind of view the world from that point on UM for sixty years now. And one of the reasons why is because it holds up. There's a lot of criticisms of it. It's not perfect, it's not complete, but the gist of it generally holds up. Yeah. And you know, we mentioned mary An's worth doing work in Uganda and UH studying like kind of cross cultural UH lengths and ties, and they did find that it is basically cross cultural UH and as we'll see even within like different animal species as well. But UH, children basically of all cultures do exhibit these attachment theory behaviors. But there were some differences, and I think what the main ones they found, doubt was that their proportions of the attachment styles were different depending on the culture, although they also said that I think they found out later that UM, socio economic differences even outweighed cultural differences, right. Yeah, and I also saw that UM, typically peers are thought to influence the development of a person's personality way more than any other factors. UM. But that's not to say that your attachment doesn't have influences on on the rest of your life, right. UM. The thing that they found, though, one of the things that makes the strange situation tests difficult is that, yes, the responses among infants are universal and fit into those four buckets, but the way that that caregivers soothe infants is is culturally constructed. It's not the same around cultures. So if you're conducting this test in the Czech Republic, you have to figure out how the people in the Czech Republic soothe their kids and then quantify the results based on those different ways of sooth their kids or not. Yeah, Czech Republic. Huh sure. That first thing that came to mind it was I'd like to go to Prague. I try to go to Prague in my backpacking adventure years ago. But our europass, our your rail pass did not cover Prague. Weird at the time. I think it probably does now, but this was, uh, you know, this is in the mid early to mid nineties, so anyway, I didn't go to Prague. Okay, should we talk about the monster. Yeah, a guy named Harry Harlow. We've talked about him before, sure, I know we have. We definitely have it think in a video in a video explainer. But his bastards of science rookie card is worth a lot of money and he is a total bastard. If there's a hell, this guy's in it, there's just no way, shape or form around it. Because his experiments seemed to have gone well beyond the realm of science and into just torture. Yeah. So what he did was worked with monkeys. Uh. And one of the main things he did as far as attachment theory go, is he got to this one experiment he would get to artificial surrogate monkey mommy's there was one that was covered in cloth, and there was one that was just made of like chicken wire, and they were both warned by a light bulb. But again, one is cloth, one is chicken wire. And he would uh, well, he found out that infant monkeys would bond with the cloth mother, no surprise. But if you started having the wire only mother provide milk, infants would go to feed with the wire uh monkey mama, and then cuddle with the cloth monkey mama. Uh. And you you know, you hear that, and you think, like, all right, that that doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world. But what he started doing it just it seems like he got increasingly more disturbing. Uh. He would raise infant monkeys in isolation, uh some times parcels, sometimes complete isolation. Uh. This would you know, basically cause mental illness in these monkeys as they grew older. He would uh some of these monkeys were so messed up that they couldn't do things like mate later in life, and he wanted to to test like intergenerationality of these effects. So what would the messed up monkeys little monkey kids be like? But these monkeys were so messed up the females they couldn't mate. So he invented a contraption which basically, uh, required that the female monkey mate. And I guess that's as deep as we need to go. Yeah. Um. He also had something that he liked to call the Pit of Despair, which was an inverted pyramid. It produced total isolation um, and that the monkeys that were inserted into the Pit of Despair were introduced to it starting at three weeks old. And so like, I mean, we know now what solitary confinement can do on an adult human after a very short time. Imagine being raised from three weeks old in solitary confinement your entire life and it just breaks you mentally, it breaks your spirit, it breaks everything about you. And again, yes, this guy showed with the wire monkey experiment that behaviorism was wrong, that they weren't just after food. They needed a bond, They needed an affection, and that need is so strong they would actually bond with a cloth covered wire monkey. That's where his experiment should have stopped, because beyond that, he's not really contributing much to it, aside from showing that you can really break monkeys by isolating them from a very early age. And even one of his students said later on that it was clear to many people the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities that anybody with respect for life, for people would find this offensive, and he was absolutely right about that. Absolutely. Um. One of the kind of cool things now that we have learned because of attachment theory is again like it gave a real blueprint for how to parent from day one. And uh, you know, behaviorism was the dominant theory before this came along, and it was really just a see change and how we saw child rearing and you know, thank goodness they came along. I guess we should talk a little bit about James Robertson, right. Yeah, I think it's great because this was in terms he you know, it's like this is all great and like as far as like how to parent better and stuff like that, but this was also a time when you know, hospital visitation of course, you know, pre COVID. You know, things are all messed up now because people it was kind of brought back to this place where you couldn't, you know, sort of be with your kid in the hospital if they were sick a lot of times because visitation rules and rites just weren't the same back then. So, uh, James Robertson comes around. He worked with Bulby in the fifties and he started noticing like, hey, this is really messed up that you'll send a a very young child to the hospital and basically tell the parents to wait at the door, and it's super stressful. And he wrote a book, I'm Sorry. He made a documentary short film called A Two year Old Goes to the Hospital and it showed these traumas that like when these and it's already bad enough that these children are being hospitalized, but imagine doing that and saying like, sorry, your parents can't like come and see you except for very specific times of day. Uh. And you know, I guess they're still visiting hours in certain circumstances. But it is not like that anymore, and largely due to the fact of the work of James Robertson. And it's not just hospitals like you think about any refugee crisis or like you know, separation of of families at the border, which is something that has happened in recent years. And you know, this is why people got so upset because like we have undeniable proof of like the damage that that does, and and like what a rama that is for a child and of course also for the parents. So it wasn't just hospital stuff. It's like splitting up families period, right, I mean, like and it does permanent damage too. It seems irrevocable or largely irrevocable. Another way that attachment theory has really affected society is that it's the it's the dominant rationale that forms the basis for how society approaches families that have problems and that their kids involved um and attachment theory basically says it's better to leave a kid in a troubled home and leave the existing attachments intact than to remove the kid. If you can support the troubled home and make it into a better home so that everyone involved has less problems and therefore the relationship between the caregivers and the kid are better. That that's attachment theory, and it kind of it points out like, just what's at steak like attachment theory. If it's not right, then we might be doing something wrong by leaving kids in troubled homes, right, um, like like kids lives are at stake, And then you can extend it even further in that attachment theory is how parents raise kids now, so the effects of attachment theory are going to be felt for generations and generations and generations. So hopefully it is right. It seems like it's right. But if if we come to find like, no, actually it's really harmful, I'll be pretty surprised. But it would be a really big deal because of how pervasive that whole thing is and how many different parts of society it touches. Yeah, for sure. All right, so I guess we should wind it up with just a little bit about adult attachment styles because this is you know, we've been talking about children, of course, because they are the ones that you would most often think of as far as being attached and bonding, but uh, this happens into adulthood and uh. One great example of several is the classic student mentor relationship, and this is sort of the same thing. The whole idea behind a student mentor isn't so different than uh, infant and parent in that the mentor should allow a student like a really safe haven to explore and to discover the possibilities and to study and provide that like secure home base for them. Right. There's also other studies on whether UM attachment might be related to your political orientation. Uh, maybe yes or no. Then there's nothing conclusive religion, whether you're religious or not. There's a little more evidence for that. But the one that really is part of pop culture and seems to have some sort of UM validity to it is how attachment in infancy translates to attachment in adult romantic relationships. That's right, And this is the kind of stuff that uh, if you've had trouble and adult romantic relationships, hopefully you have therapied this out some because nine times out of ten, UM, you can probably dive deep enough to find out, Oh, this has a lot to do with how I was raised, with how I partner up with people Now I hate my mom and dad. It turns out that that can be the revelation a lot of time. Sadly, so they've they've kind of traced like if you're what your attachment style is to what you're likely to be like in a relationship. And UM, one of them, the resistant ambivalent one, the one where you're preoccupied with attachment and you're kind of clingy. That translates oftentimes to a person who is emotionally needy and insecure, maybe jealous, maybe really threatened by anything that might you know, come between them and and the their mate. Um. That that is what it translates to in an adult relationship. And again people are really really comple x. You might check some of those boxes, you might check some other boxes. This is like a general umbrella, but there does seem to be a pretty solid correlation between these. What about um avoidant so avoidant uh? And this is it all kind of makes sense to me. Uh, They they're more likely to value freedom later in life. And then also on the downside, seek out a relationship that might be emotionally distant. Uh. Intimacy maybe a problem and they might reject those kind of relationships, right because they've learned that they can't depend on anybody else, they have to depend on themselves, so they don't feel comfortable in intimate relationships. And then the uh crime de la creme is secure of course, of course, and that means you are way more likely to have a really great relationship romantically later in life, or maybe a series of them if you're lucky, or maybe just one if that's your bag. But the point is, players double through that one. The point is you're more likely to have really good relationships and you and you know, feel safe and secure and provide comfort to your romantic partner and depend on that comfort from them, and be intimate and be open and all the great things that we strive to be. All of your haircuts turn out great, you whistle while your work. Everybody just loves you. That's the secure relationship. I just got a great haircut. What's great? What's great about this though? Is there? It's definitely been shown that you can change your attachment style as an adult. You can change how you interact with your romantic partner as an adult. You're not doomed, you're not trapped like this. This stuff can change, but it takes self reflection and introspection usually, like you said, through the hypotherapy, to to be successful at that. Yep, yes, sir, good stuff, good stuff. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Chuck's got nothing else, I got nothing else. That means it's time for a listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this hot off the presses. This is sinning like twenty minutes ago, flying by the seat of our pants here uh and this is You're not gonna leave this anonymous because I haven't checked back with this person. But this is in reference to the Tarot episode. Guys, what gives is how it starts? I've loved every episode I've listened to, but the terror win was insulting. I think you joked that it is was all made up, and then in all caps, so is everything. Everything is something made up in someone's head. Shakespeare's made up, baseball is made up. Norse mythology is made up. The recipe for jello salad is made up. The only difference between the tero and any other belief is time. Just because it isn't ancient doesn't mean that it's less valid. Less valid way of looking at the world interesting. I just I'm chomping at the bit, chuck uh me. Sitting down with my cards now to reflect on an inner turmoil is no different than someone getting on their knees to pray about a problem. Maybe you should get into that and study Christianity in that same attitude, you would have a revolt. So this person says, I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed. Okay from Anonymous. Huh yeah, I'm a check with this person. They may not want this out there, that's fine. I'm with you. I find it a little flawed as far as their argument codes. Like, people don't sit down with a recipe for jello salad and use that to try to predict their future, reflect on what's going on in their life. The same with baseball. Yeah, you could kind of compare it to religion or something like that, or praying. I agree with that, but I think the fact that it didn't exist and then became extant to make playing card games a little more interesting is kind of a fatal flaw in it. Okay, hold on, I'm taking notes. Salad based baseball not in the same as Tara. Okay, nice, all right at that? On final good thank you and thank you too, Anonymous. Sorry we let you down, But them's the brakes when you're talking about tarot. That's right. Um. If you want to get in touch with this, like Anonymous, did you can? You can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.