Judith Rich Harris (born February 10, 1938) is a psychology researcher and the author of The Nurture Assumption, a book criticizing the belief that parents are the most important factor in child development, and presenting evidence which contradicts that belief.
Harris has been a resident of Middletown Township, New Jersey.[1]
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Harris spent her early childhood moving around the USA until her parents eventually settled in Tucson, Arizona. The dry climate suited her father, who suffered from ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease.
Harris graduated from Tucson High School and attended the University of Arizona and Brandeis University, from where she graduated magna cum laude in 1959. In 1961 she received a master's degree in psychology from Harvard University.
She married Charles S. Harris in 1961; they have two daughters (one adopted) and four grandchildren.
Since 1977, Harris has suffered from a chronic autoimmune disorder, diagnosed as a combination of lupus and systemic sclerosis.
In the late 1970s, Harris developed a mathematical model of visual information processing which formed the basis for two articles in the journal Perception and Psychophysics (1979, 1984).
After 1981 she focused on textbooks about developmental psychology. With Robert Liebert, she co-authored The Child (Prentice-Hall, 1984) and Infant and Child (1992).
In 1994 she formulated a new theory of child development, focusing on the peer group rather than the family. This formed the basis for a 1995 article in the Psychological Review for which she received the American Psychological Association's George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article in General Psychology. Ironically, it was George A. Miller, then chair of the Department of Psychology that formally dismissed Harris from the PhD program at Harvard in 1960, on the grounds that her 'originality and independence' did not live up to Harvard's standards.[2][3]
Is it dangerous to claim that parents have no power at all (other than genetic) to shape their child's personality, intelligence, or the way he or she behaves outside the family home? ... A confession: When I first made this proposal ten years ago, I didn't fully believe it myself. I took an extreme position, the null hypothesis of zero parental influence, for the sake of scientific clarity. ... The establishment's failure to shoot me down has been nothing short of astonishing.
Harris's most famous work, The Nurture Assumption, was first published in 1998, with a revised version published in 2009.[5]
In this book, she challenges the idea that the personality of adults is determined chiefly by the way they were raised by their parents.[6] She looks at studies which claim to show the influence of the parental environment and claims that most fail to control for genetic influences. For example, if aggressive parents are more likely to have aggressive children, this is not necessarily evidence of parental example; it may also be that aggressiveness has been passed down through the genes. Harris also argues against the effects of birth order.[7] The book looks outside the family and points at the peer group as an important shaper of the child's psyche. Harris argues that children identify with their classmates and playmates rather than their parents, modify their behavior to fit with the peer group, and this ultimately helps to form the character of the individual.
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, was published in February 2006. Harris attempts to explain why people are so different in personality, even identical twins who grow up in the same home.[8]
She proposes that three distinct systems shape personality:
No Two Alike expands on some of the ideas from The Nurture Assumption and attempts to answer some of the criticisms leveled at the former book.