Harlow took his students to the little zoo in Madison, Wisconsin, which had a small number of primates. Harlow and his first graduate student, Abe Maslow, couldn’t run controlled experiments using so few animals. They were forced instead to observe, to keep their minds open, and to learn from species closely related to human beings. And one of the first things they saw was curiosity. The apes and monkeys liked to solve puzzles (the humans gave them tests to measure physical dexterity and intelligence), and would work at tasks for what seemed to be the sheer pleasure of it. Behaviorism, in
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