Name Judith Harris | Role Researcher | |
 | ||
Spouse Charles S. Harris (m. 1961) Books The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do Nominations Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction | ||
Radio interview with judith rich harris
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.
Contents
- Radio interview with judith rich harris
- Early life education
- Marriage and illness
- Research 19771995
- The Nurture Assumption
- No Two Alike
- Selected publications
- References
Harris has been a resident of Middletown Township, New Jersey.
Early life, education
Harris spent her early childhood moving around the United States 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 then Brandeis University where she graduated magna cum laude in 1959. Harris was dismissed from the PhD program in psychology at Harvard in 1960, because the 'originality and independence' of her work were not to Harvard's standards. She was granted a master's degree in her field, before departing.
Marriage and illness
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.
Research: 1977–1995
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, which received the American Psychological Association's George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article in General Psychology. Ironically, George A. Miller was chair of the Department of Psychology at Harvard in 1960, when Harris was dismissed from that PhD program (see above)
The Nurture Assumption
Harris's most famous work, The Nurture Assumption, was first published in 1998, with a revised version published in 2009.
In this book, she challenges the idea that the personality of adults is determined chiefly by the way they were raised by their parents. 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. 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
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.
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.