Attachment: Lorenz
Lorenz:
Lorenz was a zoologist. In 1935, he took a wide interest in imprinting; this lead Lorenz to carry out an experiment to see if he could get new born geese to imprint on him; Lorenz hatched some geese eggs and ensured the first thing that the baby geese saw was him and the printing of his wellies. The findings of this experiment was that the geese did in fact imprint on Lorenz and continuously followed him everywhere when he was outdoors as if he was their mother.
Lorenz then carried out a second experiment, similar to the first one, however at the hatching of the eggs, the original mother was there. These new baby geese imprinted on their mother - not Lorenz. He then put them all in a box together so he was unsure on which had imprinted on him or the biological mother of some in order to find out if they would still continue to follow who they imprinted on. As he released them he found that the geese that had imprinted on him continued to follow him, and similarly for the geese that imprinted on their biological mother.
The findings of this experiment were that you don’t necessarily need a primary drive (e.g. food) to form an attachment, it is mainly focused on emotional behaviour such as comfort.
Evaluation of Lorenz;
:( You cannot generalise any of Lorenz’s findings regarding animals to humans as the attachment is more emotional with human relations.
:) Has influenced our understanding of human development.
:( Lorenz stated that once you have imprinted on something, you cannot change that attachment - however a study was carried out where Guiton Et Al discovered that after some chickens had formed an attachment with some rubber gloves, they were still able to have sexual relations with other animals, meaning they could break the attachment.
