Stuff You Should Know - How Attachment Theory Works

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

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?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart 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 a ethereal. She's actually on ether, too, to really complete the whole circle. Oh boy, I wish I was. So, Chuck, surely you've heard of attachment theory before. It's so fully ingrained in the 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, 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've learned a lot. It's too late now, because, you know, my daughter's seven and a half, so we already screwed up.

But if you're just starting out with a 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 you. It's on you. Like, you, the primary caregiver, are responsible for your kid 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, but 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, 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 were like, all right, well, why? Like, let's try and figure this thing out. Yeah, because attachment, we should define it, it's basically a bond, an affinity for that an infant has for their caregiver in vice versa, typically, 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. It also seems to show up in the animal kingdom, especially among other

mammals and primates. Yeah. 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 applies to that bond that forms between baby and caregiver 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? We can't study those anyway. It 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. Peter Poe and Mary? It was strangely enough. No, it was a guy named John Bulby. There was a woman named Mary Ainsworth. And then there's another guy named William Blatt will show up later. And like, we'll talk about them a little more in a second. But Bulby basically was among a small handful of people who said, Hey, that whole behaviorist 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. And sometimes a caregiver can sue the baby without any food. So I don't think it's just food that they're after. I think it's something more intangible, but just as important as food. Yeah, like if your baby's scared, it's, yeah, it's not all just about that, you know, that

milk that you're getting. And, you know, that stuff's important. Like we talked about in the breastfeeding episode, 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 that's not breastfeeding bond. Sure. Oh, the bond. Sure. I get you. Yeah. But so, yeah, that bond in and of itself is what Bulby and attachment theory says is the important part of the bond. It's the bond. The bond isn't like some, 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 cares for that little, little baby. And that's, it almost sounds like on the surface like, wait, what's the big difference? The difference is, 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 at least in our case, like right when my daughter was born, she comes out and 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. And that skin on skin contact, they say is just, you know, do it as much as you can, as often as you can 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 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 meant to look into that, but it's one thing that this, 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 saying that skin on skin contact is easier. Skin to win is our motto. So the upshot of attachment theory is this, 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 like cuddled, 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 the attachment theory. And that's not it. If you don't do that exactly,

then it has all sorts of other effects that make the kid not secure from that time on. Yeah. And you know, a lot of this may seem like no duh type of stuff now, because we're way more just sort of in tune with that kind of thing now and 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, 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 they're up until, semi-recently, there were times where it was like, no, if your child's upset, you know, try and get them to not be upset in any way you can. And maybe that's 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. You know, because I'm not saying there's no like behavioral things you need to address. But 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 to, or if behaviorism was a diversion from stuff we've been doing before, which probably bore a strong resemblance to attachment theory. That's, I never thought about that. You know? Yeah, like Tuk Tuk may have been a better parent than dad in the 1940s. Yeah, and Bob Dobbs or something. Yeah, exactly. So let's talk about

the people who literally changed the world, because you really put your finger on something, something sticky and smelly. When you said that it just seems like no duh now, like that is how thoroughly it has completely permeated Western society. Yeah. And you can point to John Bulby and Mary Ainsworth as two people who changed the world by getting attachment theory across and showing like this actually has real legs. Yeah. So Bulby was a Brit, he was a psychiatrist, and he was raised, it's pretty clear that he probably had some kind of money growing up, because he was raised by a host of nannies in England. And 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 split for another job when he was really young. And when you're a little kid, like if that's your scene growing up, that main nanny, that's like your caregiver. And so it would I would guess be akin to like mom leaving or something like that. Oh yeah, for sure. And this was in like the what, like 1930s. So he started exploring that, which was a very, I think kind of forward introspective kind of thing to be thinking about back then. 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 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. Totally. I mean, would we even have attachment theory? It's a big question. Or Mary Ainsworth may have just had a tougher time because they really, it seems worked great in tandem together. Right. So Bulby, he started investigating juvenile delinquents. 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 machinations of things. So he started looking at juvenile delinquents and basically was like, it's the kid's home life that makes them a delinquent. It's nothing else. Like you can take poverty away. You can rule out all these other factors. And if the home life is stable and supportive, the kid's 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 society through his research and his theories. Yeah, and I thought it was interesting in 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 and chiefly World War II. World War II 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 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 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, fathers going off to war, like children were removed from their parents to get them to safer places out in the countryside. Yeah. If you've ever seen the Lady in Black II, the horror movie, that's kind of the premise of it. I have it. I'm sure you 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 war effort working in 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's moves into the juvenile delinquents. He had a paper called 44 Juvenile Thieves, Their Character and Home Life. Yeah. And that's when he was like, it's the home life 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 may be like a criminal later in life. And they may be using, you know, like stealing material things, maybe a literal substitute or I guess not a literal substitute. There I go. A figurative substitute for the fact that they didn't get the love they needed as a kid. And I think, you know, I don't think he talked about it 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 formed, basically, hired him in 1950 to work on the mental health of homeless children. Amazing. It is amazing. This guy was a pretty amazing dude just based on his research, right? Yeah, just as they were 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 based, I know it's a great title. I love it.

But it was based on the work and the research that he did for the World Health Organization. But he very wisely, I get the impression, wrote it for a popular audience. Yeah. And that helped the whole theory gain traction. And the theory was these juvenile delinquents I've been investigating 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, the internist after that, huh? Agreed. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove. And, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists.

We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS Team Supreme. They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving and music, everything, all monacking your musical history and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought. Then you're a lot like me, but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme

on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw,

inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social

media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. Okay, Chuck, so we're back and it's high time that Mary Ainsworth wrote in on her Palomino and then along came Mary. That's great, great reference there. Thank you. 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 Bulbys, that they came up with this together and she was very much lauded within her lifetime. She was seen and respected for her work during the 50s 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 moved to London. I don't know if she did it to specifically work with Bulby 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. Blatz. And Blatz came up with something called security theory, which basically says that if a kid has security early in life that they can trust in 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 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 delish. Yeah. Finky 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, they ended up working together at Johns Hopkins University. And she developed a very famous experiment called The Strange Situation, capital S, capital S. And it sounds kind of mean, but it's not as mean as it got. And you'll find out later on that 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 kid and their caregiver in a room for 21 minutes. And over those 21

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 conspicuous exit, whatever that means. Bye, I'm leaving. I guess so. But and it wasn't like the stranger would come in and just sit there with crossed arms. Like it says that the stranger would be like geared toward the child's activities or whatever. So I would like to see in action to see what they actually did. But it was just a series of comings and goings with the goal to basically kind of see what, you know, how the child reacts and what to their mind

might 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 capital S, capital S 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 even more important, or just as important, I should say, she also did

some field work in Uganda, studying like infant caregiver bonding and found that like, these kids respond in the same way as American kids do in these same four buckets. So she was definitely onto something for sure. Yeah. And that kind of work became super important as far as, you know, because it wasn't just like, let's just explore that what's happening with these American babies. Like they wanted to find out if it was cross-cultural and then eventually drilling down even more to like socioeconomic and stuff like that. So all just super valuable stuff. For sure. So it's like you said, Bowlby came up with the theories and Ainsworth figured out how to explain why those theories did a pretty good job of explaining bonding and attachment, right?

Yeah. So just to kind of like get a little further into behaviorism and what they were up against by coming up with this completely radical new idea of what makes a good human being, they were up against behaviorism and one of the most famous behaviorists was BF Skinner. Oh, yeah. And what BF 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 punishment, but depending on whether you want to encourage that behavior or discourage that behavior, you punish it or you reward it, right? Yeah. And that means that that behavior then is learned. That's the basis of behavioralism, that these behaviors are learned traits. And that's not at all what Bowlby and

Ainsworth were finding. They came to realize or believe 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 about that a bunch of times. For sure. But so like these guys were saying like they turned this behaviorist explanation for bonding into like child rearing practices and like wrote books and basically said like, if your baby's crying and you pick that baby up and soothe it, you have just reinforced the 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. Yeah. They almost treated it as if you were like 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 behaviorist named John B. Watson. I think we've spoken about him before too. His name is very familiar, but he wrote a parenting book and 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. You should shake hands with them in the morning. Well, I agree with that part. 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 interaction that they said, if you do this with your kid, you're going to produce a good kid, not a social deviant monster who, and frankly, this fully explains the boomer generation because this is about the time that these kids were being born and raised. Yeah. When was Watson around? The 50s. This is the 50s. Yeah. I'd be curious to find out what his, 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 going to turn out to be aces. They're going to be the toast when

they get older. Yeah. No good. Yeah. Nice ref. That almost slipped by me. Should we talk about the three sort of buckets, which basically are the three attachment styles? I think we should. All right. Well, the first one is, well, it turned out that there were four, but thankfully, the fourth is a very small percentage of infants are exposed to this kind of attachment. But the first is secure. And that means you're doing great as a parent. 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 support and by calming them and by nurturing them rather than 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 going to feel supported. They're going to feel like they're able to express negative emotions. And I think that is a semi-modern thing is negative feelings are okay. 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. And shake hands afterward. Shake hands. Well done. Here's a cucumber sandwich. And this is called an organized and they're sort of further described as organized or disorganized. This one is organized. And I think what 65 to 70 percent, which is a pretty good number of infants apparently 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, 65, 70 percent of 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 parent 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 forms that secure attachment, right? Yeah. And like you said, it's organized because the kid knows that they can go to the parent. The parent's going to 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. The next

one that she found, I think covers about 20 to 25 percent of infants. It's avoidant. Yeah. And this one is where the caregiver just doesn't really give the kid what they need. And we're talking infants here, right? Yeah. Does it like 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 kid's distress and like little baby, what's wrong little baby? Are you upset kind of thing? Yeah. Which I mean, I can't imagine how many times I've heard that in my life, like in movies or 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 in the actual strange

situation, the kid is totally normal. 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 all good. I'm just going to 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 you learn as an infant if you have an avoidant attachment. Yeah, like 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 comes into play. Popeye, when he was an infant and Pappy wasn't around, there was a lot of like, they had a lot of unpacking to do. He and Pappy. I don't remember that at all. I just remember him beating people up. Yeah, Pappy was Popeye's dad. Sure. And he didn't get the love he needed when he was an infant. And so that's probably why he was violent 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. 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 inconsistent, where Pappy was sometimes like, oh, it's okay. I'm 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 the other one. I mean, it depends on your definition, sure. Yeah, I mean, this is something I've learned as a parent

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 schedule and disrupting a structure is very, like it shouldn't be taken lightly as a parent, 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 coming back from a vacation 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. And I think that's sort of in a way that sort of inconsistency playing out, you know, as a kid gets older. Right. Yeah, no, totally. And like in the

strange situation experiment, these kids were distressed even before the parent left. Yeah. 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 clingy to the parent. Right. And I saw this explained as these kids develop a preoccupation with their attachment. They're not sure when their caretakers going to respond to them. So they can't focus on anything else, but whether or not their caretakers going to respond to them and they, by being clingy, they're 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 as 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, 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, maybe not able to like concentrate on the needs of the kids or at least consistently. So it's also inconsistent, just like resistant is, but this feels like inconsistent plus, right?

Right. It's like you may intimidate the kid to stop crying. You may yell at the kid to stop crying. I get the impression with the ambivalent, resistant kid, the caretakers not yelling at you or 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 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 all right, kind of thing. And so that kid's not getting any. Kids like you're really phoning it in. 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 frequently as they might go to their parent when they came back. They might run from their parent. They might freeze and not know which person to go to. They might be confused because their caregiver is a source of fear, but they still have that need. They just don't know where to get it. It's extremely sad. And it is the kind that seems to really lead to serious problems early in life and then onto adulthood. You ever do that thing? You and Yumi ever do that thing where you put Momo in the middle of you and you stand for her part 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 Yumi. She wouldn't be happy about it, but she would go to Yumi. Oh, that's sad. I don't know why people would do that, but I've seen that done on the internet probably as a joke. Surely no one would do that and put any stock in it. Speaking of a joke, Yumi showed me this. There was this meme recently, although this comes out in a couple weeks, so this meme will probably be ancient by then. But there's a trend, I think on TikTok, where kids fake reading the news that their parents' favorite celebrity has died, and then they tape it. That's all that. And some of the reactions. A lot of people are upset about this. Oh, man, I can understand being upset about it because it is really emotionally abusive, but at the same time,

if you watch a highlight reel of some of the more pronounced responses, it's tough not to crack up. I haven't seen any of them. I just saw that some celebrities were pretty ticked off about it. Why would the celebrities be ticked off? I don't know. Why are celebrities ever ticked off? I don't know celebrities who need them. Remember that point at the very beginning of the pandemic, where we almost got rid of celebrities? Yeah. Do you remember? Everybody was so sick of celebrities. There was that whole Gal Gadot screw up about singing. Imagine Madonna in the bath with Rose Petal talking about how everybody's equal. Everybody was just sick and tired of celebrities right then, and it seemed like we were going to shed our fascination with them, and it just

didn't pan out. Good luck. Yeah, right. All right. We should probably take our second break, and then we'll talk about, we mentioned testing these theories, and there's more to it than just the capital S, capital S strange situation. So we'll be back right after this to talk about testing. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove, and at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill, and we at Questlove Supreme like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art. I love QLS because of the QLS team supreme.

They're like a second family to me. You're a fan of deep diving and music everything, all monacking your musical history, and learning things about hip hop artists and things you never thought, then you're a lot like me, but you're also a fan of Questlove Supreme. One of the things I love the most about this show is that we get to learn from the masters. I look at being on this show as my graduate program in music. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app. Have a podcast wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows.

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. And it's really tough in this case because it's hard to get, you know, when you're studying humans like this, and especially this kind of thing where you study infant 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 think about the variables that might come up that would also influence the outcomes, which in this case, it's like, it's almost an infinite list of variables that could affect these kinds of studies. Yeah, like, are you going to screen the study participants for, you know, genetic traits that you are going to try to control for or whether there's lead paint in their home? There's just so much stuff. And it also is based on how complex humans are and how many influences we have. But the upshot of it is that attachment theory has been the dominant explanation for how little baby personalities are formed and how we kind of view the world from that point on for 60 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 Ainsworth doing work in Uganda and studying like kind of cross-cultural lengths and ties. And they did find that it is basically cross-cultural. And as we'll see even within like different animal species as well. But 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 out about was that the proportions of the attachment styles were different depending on the culture. Although they also said that I think they found out later that socioeconomic differences

even outweighed cultural differences, right? Yeah. And I also saw that typically peers are thought to influence the development of a person's personality way more than any other factors. Oh, interesting. But that's not to say that your attachment doesn't have influences on the rest of your life, right? Yeah. The thing that they found though, one of the things that makes the strange situation test difficult is that, yes, the responses among infants are universal and fit into those four buckets. But the way that caregivers soothe infants is culturally constructed. It's not the same around cultures. Right. 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 soothing their kids or not. Yeah. Czech Republic, huh? Sure. Is that the first thing that came to mind? It was. Okay. I'd like to go to Prague. I tried to go to Prague in my backpacking adventure years ago, but our Europass or your rail pass did not cover Prague. Weird. At the time. I think it probably does now, but this was, you know, this is in the mid, early to mid 90s. So anyway, didn't go to Prague. Okay. Should we talk about the monster? Yeah. A guy named Harry Harlow, we've talked about him before. Have we? Sure. I know we have. We definitely have it. I think in a video, in a video explainer before. Oh, okay. But his bastards of science rookie card is worth a lot of money.

Yeah. And he is a total bastard. If there's a hell of this guy's in it, there's just no way shape or form around it because his experiments seem to have gone well beyond the realm of science and into just torture. Yeah. So what he did was worked with monkeys. And one of the main things he did as far as attachment theory goes, he got two, this one experiment, he would get two artificial surrogate monkey mommies. 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, well, he found out that infant monkeys would bond with a cloth mother, no surprise. But if you started having the wire only mother provide milk, infants would

go to feed with the wire monkey mama and then cuddle with the cloth monkey mama. And you, you know, you hear that and you think, all right, that doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world. But what he started doing, it just, it seems like it got increasingly more disturbing. He would raise infant monkeys in isolation, sometimes partial, sometimes complete isolation. This would, you know, basically cause mental illness in these monkeys as they grew older. He would, some of these monkeys were so messed up that they couldn't do things like mate later in life. And he wanted 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 required that the female monkey mate. And I guess that's as deep as we need to go. Yeah. He also had something that he liked to call the pit of despair, which was an inverted pyramid. It produced total isolation 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 or people would find this offensive. And he was absolutely right about that. Absolutely. 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 you know, behaviorism was the dominant theory before this came along. And it was really just a sea change in how we saw child rearing. And 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, it's like, this is all great. And as far as how to parent better and stuff like that. But this was also a time when hospital visitation, of course, pre-COVID, 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 rights just weren't the same back then. So James Robertson comes around, he worked with Bulby in the 50s. And he started noticing like, Hey, this is really messed up that you'll send 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, or I'm sorry, he'd made a documentary, a 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. And you know, I guess they're still visiting ours 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 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 like what a trauma 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

dominant rationale that forms the basis for how society approaches families that have problems and that they're kids involved. 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's attachment theory. And it kind of, it points out like just what's at stake. Like attachment theory, if it's not right, then we might be doing something wrong by leaving kids in troubled homes, right? Right. 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 we come to find like, no, actually, this is 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 this happens into adulthood.

And 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 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 attachment might be related to your political orientation. 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 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 if you've had trouble in adult romantic relationships, hopefully you have therapyed this out some because nine times out of 10, 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 can be the revelation a lot of times, sadly. So they've kind of traced like what your attachment style is to what you're likely to be like in a relationship. And 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 come between them and their mate. That is what it translates to in an adult relationship. And again, people are really, really complex. 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. Totally. What about avoidant? So avoidant, and this is, it all kind of makes sense to me, 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. Intimacy may be 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 creme 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, I stumbled through that one, the point is you're more likely to have really good relationships and 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 you work. Everybody

just loves you. That's the secure relationship. I just got a great haircut. What's great about this though is 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 stuff can change, but it takes self-reflection and introspection. Usually, like you said, through the help of therapy 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 going to call this hot off the presses. This was sent in like 20 minutes ago. Flying by the seat of our pants here. And this is, you're not going to leave this anonymous because I haven't checked back with this person. But this is in reference to the Tarot episode. Guys, what gives? That's how it starts. I've loved every episode I've listened to, but the Tarot one was insulting, I think. You joked that it 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 Jell-O salad is made up.

The only difference between the Tarot 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'm chomping at the bit, Chuck. 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 in 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 goes. People don't sit down with a recipe for Jell-O salad and use that to try to predict their future or reflect on what's going on in their life. Same with baseball. Yeah, you could kind of compare it to a 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. Jell-O, salad, baseball, not same as Tarot. Okay. Nice. All right. I'll put that on final.

Good. Thank you. And thank you to anonymous. Sorry we let you down, but dims the brakes when you're talking about Tarot. That's right. If you want to get in touch with us like anonymous did, you can. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. of healing. Listen to navigating narcissism on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends, Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Umpink, Bill.

And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors, politicians, creatives, people that we feel really deserve that attention. We learn, we laugh, we fall down rabbit holes. Listen to Questlove Supreme on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward. And I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast

network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.