The Ape and the Child

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Ape and the Child was the title of a study by Winthrop Kellogg and also the title of a book on that study.

The experiment was started in 1931. Kellogg raised his son Donald (ten months old at the beginning of the experiment) together with the chimpanzee Gua (seven months old at the beginning of the experiment) in order to find out to what extent the difference between humans and apes is due to nature and to what extent it is caused by culture be.

Donald and Gua were treated exactly the same. Both were dressed alike, both were taught to potty and eat with a spoon. Gua showed amazing adaptations to their human environment. She initially developed faster than Donald, obeyed her "parents" better, and was superior to Donald in tests of cognitive skills (for example, she realized more quickly than Donald that she needed a chair to get to a banana dangling from the ceiling). But there was one thing that Donald surpassed Gua: he was the better impersonator. Gua was the leader, discovered toys and games, Donald imitated them. This was also true in the area of ​​language: Donald learned to imitate Gua's food call. At the age of 19 months, Donald could only speak three human words. An average child, on the other hand, begins to form sentences at this age. At that point the experiment was stopped and Gua was sent back to the zoo.

Donald began to adopt normal human behavior and became a normal man. He later went to Harvard and studied medicine there. He committed suicide a few months after his parents died in 1972. The psychologist Ludy T. Benjamin, who studied Kellogg's experiment, suspects that Donald Kellogg was depressed because his father expected him to be absolutely perfect.

Book edition

  • WM Kellogg: The Ape and the Child . A Study of Environmental Influence Upon Early Behavior, Hafner, 1967

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reto U. Schneider: The chimpanzee in the stroller. NZZ Folio, December 2002, accessed on November 26, 2016 .