Harris, Judith Rich 1938-

PERSONAL:

Born February 10, 1938, in New York, NY; daughter of Sam L. and Frances Rich; married Charles S. Harris, December 24, 1961; children: Nomi, Elaine. Education: Brandeis University, B.A., 1959; Harvard University, M.A., 1961.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Middletown, NJ. Agent—Katinka Matson, Brockman, Inc., 5 E. 59th St., New York, NY 10022. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Harvard University, research assistant, 1961; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, teaching assistant in psychology, 1961-62; Bolt Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, MA, research assistant, 1962-63; University of Pennsylvania, research assistant, 1963-65; Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, research assistant, 1975-77. Freelance science writer, editor, and data analyst, 1979-81. Textbook writer, 1981-94. Freelance writer, 1994—.

MEMBER:

Association for Psychological Science, PEN-American Center, Phi Beta Kappa.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Lila J. Pearlman Award in Psychology, 1959; research fellowship in psychology, Rutgers University, 1978-79; George A. Miller Award, American Psychological Association, 1998; nominated for Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology, and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, both 1999, both for The Nurture Assumption; David Horrobin Prize for medical theory, from Medical Hypotheses, for the article "Parental selection: a third selection process in the evolution of human hairlessness and skin color," 2006.

WRITINGS:

(With Robert M. Liebert) The Child: Development from Birth through Adolescence, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliff, NJ), 1984.

(With Robert M. Liebert) Infant and Child: Development from Birth through Middle Childhood, Prentice Hall, 1992.

The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn out the Way They Do, Free Press (New York City), 1998.

No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, W.W. Norton & Co. (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor of articles to professional journals, including Perception and Psychophysics, Psychological Review, Psychological Inquiry, Journal of Personality, and the Harvard Education Letter.

Author's works have been translated into fourteen languages.

SIDELIGHTS:

After co-writing several textbooks on child development, Judith Rich Harris shocked the psychological establishment in 1998 with the publication of her controversial book, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn out the Way They Do, in which she overturned traditional theories of child development. Harris argued that parents have no power to mold their children's personalities and proposed instead that children's personalities are shaped partly by heredity and partly by their experiences in their peer group. In her critique of previous research and her formulation of a new theory of development (group socialization theory), Harris drew on research from social, developmental, and evolutionary psychology; behavioral genetics; and anthropology.

The Nurture Assumption created a whirlwind of controversy; opinions on the book were sharply divided. As quoted in Newsweek, several renowned scientists supported Harris's work. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky judged it to be "based on solid science" and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker predicted that it "will come to be seen as a turning point in the history of psychology." Most developmental psychologists, on the other hand, reacted negatively, alleging that Harris's position was extreme, absurd, and even dangerous. According to Sharon Begley of Newsweek: "Many of the nation's leading scholars of child development accuse Harris of screwy logic, of misunderstanding behavioral genetics and of ignoring studies that do not fit her thesis." However, USA Today quoted behavioral geneticist David Lykken as saying that Harris's treatment of the research "is very accurate, and the conclusions she draws are very accurate." Her work, according to Lykken, should "make hundreds of developmental psychologists nervous."

In the New York Times Book Review, psychologist Carol Tavris discussed the strengths and weaknesses of The Nurture Assumption: "What makes Harris's book important is that it puts all these theories into larger perspective, showing what each contributes and where it's flawed." She continued: "Lively anecdotes about real children suffuse this book, but Harris never confuses anecdotes with data. The originality of The Nurture Assumption lies not in the studies she cites, but in the way she has reconfigured them to explain findings that have puzzled psychologists for years … I don't agree with all the author's claims and interpretations; often she reaches too far to make her case," acknowledged Tavris. "But such criticisms should not detract from her accomplishment, which is to give us a richer, more accurate portrait of how children develop than we've had from outdated Freudianism or piecemeal research."

Harris began her writing career as an author of textbooks. The Child: Development from Birth to Adolescence, cowritten by Robert M. Liebert, was a critically well-received college textbook that presented a conventional view of child development. Charlotte Patterson, writing in Contemporary Psychology, praised The Child as "accurate and up to date on the one hand, and readable and interesting on the other." Harris had begun work on a new textbook when she had the idea that caused her to change her mind about child development. "I suddenly realized that many of the things I had been telling the readers of my textbooks were wrong," she told CA. She abandoned the textbook and instead wrote a theoretical article, published in 1995 in the journal Psychological Review. Her article, "Where Is the Child's Environment: A Group Socialization Theory of Development," won an award from the American Psychological Association in 1998, and was the starting point for The Nurture Assumption.

In No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, Harris takes another look at personality development, this time addressing the question of how each human being can be unique. Even identical twins, who have the same genes and grow up in the same environment, develop distinct and individual personalities. This volume does much to reiterate Harris's findings from her earlier work, The Nurture Assumption. In the new work, Harris practices her same method of investigation, studying individuals with the same genes who have been raised in different environments, and conversely, those with different genes raised in identical environments. The idea is to see whether there are significantly different personality traits in either case. As in her earlier study, Harris determines that the home environment may have short-term but no permanent effects on a child's personality. A contributor for Kirkus Reviews was somewhat skeptical of the results as stated by the book, stating that "there is something a little too rational and static, a little too game-theoretical in Harris's approach." William Saletan in the New York Times Book Review remarked: "Harris the author scrupulously follows clues; Harris the protagonist drives the story forward through force of character, arriving at a theory of personality that could be said to describe herself." E. James Lieberman, in a review for the Library Journal, found that "Harris makes behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology enjoyable and accessible to general readers."

Harris told CA: "I became a writer because it was something I could do at home. I've been more or less stuck at home for the past thirty years, due to chronic health problems. Because I cannot travel, it has been a source of great satisfaction to see my ideas traveling around the world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Contemporary Psychology, January, 1985, Charlotte Patterson, review of The Child: Development from Birth through Adolescence, pp. 78-79.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2005, review of No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, p. 1301.

Library Journal, February 1, 2006, E. James Lieberman, review of No Two Alike, p. 95.

Newsweek, September 7, 1998, Sharon Begley, "The Parent Trap," pp. 52-57.

New York Times Book Review, September 13, 1998, Carol Tavris, review of The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn out the Way They Do, pp. 14-15; March 5, 2006, William Saletan, "Irreconcilable Differences" review of No Two Alike.

Publishers Weekly, August 10, 1998, p. 380.

USA Today, August 24, 1998, review of The Nurture Assumption, p. 67.