Judith rich harris biography

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.

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. Library Journal, February 1, , E. James Lieberman, review of No Two Alike, p. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. January 13, Retrieved January 13, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Arts Educational magazines Harris, Judith Rich Harris, Judith Rich gale. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. More From encyclopedia. Harris, John F.

Harris, John. Harris, Joe. She rounds up the usual suspects and shows why none of the currently popular explanations for human differences-birth order effects, for example, or interactions between genes and environment-can be the perpetrator she is looking for. Based on a principle of evolutionary psychology-the idea that the human mind is a toolbox of special-purpose devices-Harris's theory explains how attributes we all have in common can make us different.

Daughter of Sam L. Bachelor, Brandeis University, Master of Arts, Harvard University, Honorary research fellow in psychology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, ; freelance science writer, since Married Charles S. Harris, December 24, Children: Nomi L. Back to Profile. Photos Works. Her case began with a finding that was common knowledge among behavioral geneticists but unknown to most psychologists or to the public: that the similarities between parents and their biological children can be explained by their shared genes siblings reared apart grow up no more different than siblings reared together, and adopted siblings are not similar to each other at all.

It was bolstered by findings on the minimal effects of big differences in upbringing, such as first born versus later-born, day care versus having a stay-at-home mom," and heterosexual versus homosexual parents. It got a third shot of support from the immigrant experience—children of immigrants melt into their peer groups. Her article won the George Miller Prize from the American Psychological Association, proof, she wrote, that the gods have a sense of humor: the letter kicking her out of graduate school had been signed by the Acting Chair of the department at the time, who was none other than George Miller.

Her book, The Nurture Assumption , became a best seller, made the covers of leading mainstream magazines, and caused a sensation in the news media. She was a big influence on a number of social scientists, including me. That chapter was the most commented-upon discussion in the hundreds of reviews and interviews. Harris defied the stereotype of an experimental psychologist in other ways.

Stricken with an autoimmune disorder, she was a physical shut-in but a prolific correspondent. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. Poor old Mum and Dad: publicly accused by their son, the poet, and never given a chance to reply to his charges.

They shall have one now, if I may take the liberty of speaking for them:. Are you an extremist? I guess you could call that an extreme statement. But I prefer to think of myself as a defender of the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the hypothesis that a putative "cause" has no effect, and it's supposed to be the starting point for scientific inquiry.

For instance, when a new drug is being tested, the researchers are expected to start out with the hypothesis that the drug is no better than a placebo. If they find that the patients who received the drug are more likely to recover than the ones who got the placebo, then they can reject the null hypothesis at some level of confidence, some probability level.

This comes as a surprise to most people, but psychologists have still not managed to collect evidence of a sort that would enable them to reject the null hypothesis of zero parental influence. In the absence of such evidence, the only scientifically sound position is the one I've taken. But why should I have to? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the people who claim that parents do have an effect?

Shouldn't the burden of proof be on the people who claim that their treatment—the style of child-rearing they recommend—works the way they say it will? The problem is that the null hypothesis of zero parental influence hasn't been treated as the starting point, due to a pervasive pattern of thought I call "the nurture assumption. It's an a priori bias based on faith rather than evidence.

BROCKMAN: But some people are saying that there is evidence—plenty of evidence—of parental influence, and that for some reason you have chosen to ignore it. I've looked at it closely and found it to be worthless. The evidence they're talking about is hopelessly confounded and is contradicted by other evidence. Let me give you an example.

Many studies have shown that verbal, literate parents tend to have verbal, literate kids. Parents who talk to their kids a lot tend to have kids with an above-average vocabulary. Parents who read to their kids tend to have kids who become good readers. This evidence comes packaged with a moral: If you want your kid to get into Harvard, you'd better start drilling him 18 years before his application is due.

The trouble is, the evidence is ambiguous. It's clear that children resemble their biological parents; what isn't clear is why. Is it the environment the parents provided, or is it the genes they provided? Just knowing there's a correlation isn't enough—we have to tease apart the effects of the genes from the effects of the home environment.

One way to do it is by looking at adopted kids. And what we find is that the correlation disappears. The adopted child reared in a let's-read-a book-together home ends up no smarter, on the average, than the one reared in a don't-bother-me-I'm-watching-TV home. As far as Harvard is concerned, it doesn't make a dime's worth of difference whether the kid grew up listening to Mozart or Muzak.

In general, studies that provide a way of controlling for the effects of the genes by looking at twins, siblings, or adopted children show that the home environment has little or no effect on intelligence or personality. They show that the similarities between parents and their biological children, or between two biological siblings reared in the same home, are almost entirely a function of their shared genes.

Eliminate the effect of the shared genes and you've eliminated all, or nearly all, of the similarity. The environment definitely matters too. In fact, for personality which is what I'm mainly interested in , only about half the variation from one person to another can be attributed to the genes. More precisely, about half the reliable variance in measured personality characteristics—the variance that remains after measurement error is subtracted—can be attributed to differences in genes.

Nowadays most of them are quite willing to admit that children are born with predispositions to develop in a certain way, and they're even willing to admit that these predispositions have a genetic basis. But it doesn't seem to have dawned on them that children get their genes from their parents. They still haven't acknowledged the fact that whatever genetic predispositions the children have, there's a good chance the parents have them too.

A child who was born timid has a better-than-average chance of being reared by a timid parent. A child who was born aggressive has a better-than-average chance of being reared by an aggressive parent. And the parents' genes are going to influence how they rear their kids. Timid parents are likely to be wimpier in their child-rearing methods; aggressive parents will be quicker to punish; affable parents will dole out more affection and praise.

So everything's correlated: the parents' characteristics, the children's characteristics, and the parents' style of child-rearing. We haven't a hope of untangling this mess unless we have some way of factoring out genetic effects. And when the behavioral geneticists used these methods, they found something very surprising and puzzling, and it didn't have to do with genes, it had to do with the environment.

What they found, in study after study, was that the environment shared by two kids reared in the same home could account for no more than 5 percent of the variance in personality characteristics. Heredity accounts for about half, so the other half must be due to the environment. But it isn't the homeenvironment—at least, it isn't the environment shared by siblings who grow up in the same home.

The reason this is surprising is that the environment shared by siblings includes most of the things that are generally thought to have important effects on a child's development. The parents may have a happy or unhappy marriage or no marriage at all; the mother may stay home or go to work; the parents may spend their free time reading books or watching TV or going to a gambling casino.

All these things are part of the shared environment: all the children in the family experience them in common, and if they're twins they experience them at the same age. But once we control for heredity by looking at twins or adopted children, we find that the shared environment has little or no effect. HARRIS: The problem is that if you don't use these methods, any environmental factor that you look at is likely to reflect genetic variation too.

The parents who spend their time reading books are likely to differ in personality from the ones who opt for the gambling casino, and personality is partly genetic. So if their kids turn out differently, you can't tell if it's because of the environment the parents provided or the genes they provided.

Judith rich harris biography

One thing we can do, though, is to look at environmental factors that are less likely to reflect genetic variations in personality. For example, the home environment of the only child is very different from that of the child with siblings. All the affection, all the criticism, all the hopes and dreams that would normally be divided among two or three kids gets piled on this one poor kid.

And yet researchers have been unable to find any consistent differences between only children and children with siblings. They've spent a lot of time looking for them, and published studies often do report minor differences—it's hard to get something published if there are no significant effects—but it's a different difference in each study. There's no overall tendency for the only child to be more neurotic or selfish, or less friendly or popular, than the child with siblings.

HARRIS: I'm giving you proof that, in the ways parents are usually thought to have influence, they have little or no influence on the outcomes that have been measured so far. But I can't prove that they have zero influence. For one thing, there's that 5 percent I mentioned. A typical behavioral genetic study shows that about 5 percent of the variation in adult personality can be attributed to the environment shared by siblings who grew up in the same home.

But one of the weaknesses of the behavioral genetic method is that it can't distinguish between the shared home environment and the environment that siblings share outside the home. Siblings who grow up in the same home also live in the same neighborhood and go to the same schools. If they're twins they probably belong to the same peer group.

I attribute the 5 percent to experiences shared by siblings outside the home, and, with the methods currently available, there's no way to prove that I'm wrong. On the other hand, I have no way to rule out the possibility that some or all of that 5 percent is due to shared experiences at home. Second, researchers haven't looked at all the possible ways that parents could conceivably influence their kids.

Perhaps there are subtle effects that their measuring instruments have missed. I must say, though, that they've been looking for them for an awfully long time. Third, the data we have don't cover the entire range of families. They cover a wide range, but the same kinds of families that slip through the net of the census takers are also likely to missed by researchers.

I can't rule out the possibility that a home environment could be bad enough to inflict permanent damage on a child's personality or mental health. And fourth, it's possible that parents influence their children in ways that are completely unsystematic and unpredictable. What the behavioral genetic results show is that children raised in the same family don't turn out alike, except to the degree that they share genes.

But why should they turn out alike when everybody knows that parents don't treat their children alike? Maybe parents treat their children differently in a completely random fashion—eeny, meeny, miney, mo—and maybe these random differences have important effects. HARRIS: Random in the sense that the parents aren't just reacting to pre-existing differences in the children themselves—differences the children were born with.

We know that parents do react to genetic differences between their children—for example, that a child with a troublesome disposition will be treated more harshly than one who was born agreeable. The problem is that these differences in parental behavior can't explain what we're trying to explain: the differences in personality, not caused by differences in genes, between two people who grew up in the same household.

These unexplained differences turn up in adoptive siblings, in ordinary biological siblings, and in identical twins reared together, and we need an explanation that will work for all three kinds of sibling pairs. We need an explanation for the personality differences between identical twins reared in the same household, and we can't blame them on the parents' response to genetic differences between the twins, because there aren't any genetic differences between the twins.

The vague but popular idea that it must be an "interaction" between heredity and environment won't work either. If there isn't any genetic difference, an interaction between heredity and environment can't produce a difference. It has to be a difference in environment, which puts us back to where we started. Identical twins aren't necessarily exactly alike when they're born.

One can be larger or healthier than the other. And there's no question that parents act differently toward a healthy child and a sick one, or to a larger child and a smaller one. But if these differences in parental behavior had long-term effects, we would have known about them a long time ago, because they would have turned up in birth order studies.

There's no question that parents treat older children differently from younger ones, and firstborns differently from laterborns. These are systematic differences in parental behavior, not random ones, so if they had important effects it would be easy to detect them. Firstborns are given more responsibility; more is expected of them; they tend to be punished more harshly for mistakes.

Parents are more tolerant of laterborns. Once another baby is born and the parents are taking care of both children at the same time, it's the younger one who gets the lion's share of attention and affection. This is true the world around: parents pay more attention and are more indulgent towards the youngest and smallest of their offspring.

The firstborn may end up with the title or the farm, but it's the laterborn who gets the kisses. Of course, this is going to vary from one family to another—an adorable 3-year -old might get more affection than a whiny or unattractive baby. But the trend is clear. In the studies I cited in my book, at least half of the parents questioned admitted that they gave more affection to one child than the other, and more than 80 percent of these parents favored the younger child.

You'd expect favoritism of this magnitude to lead to sizable birth order effects, if differences in parental treatment had important effects on children's personalities. You'd expect birth order to account for a noticeable amount of the unexplained variation in personality. But it doesn't. If birth order effects on personality exist at all, they must be very small and fragile, because big, well-done studies more often than not fail to find them.

However, there's an interesting exception to that rule. Significant birth order effects usually do turn up when personality is judged in a family context—for example, when parents are asked to judge the personalities of their children, or people are asked to compare themselves to their siblings. The trouble is, it doesn't tell you how they function in the world they inhabit as adults, which is what we would like to explain.

HARRIS: That's what most people believe: that what you learn at home in the early years forms a template for your future. That your early relationships set a pattern you are constrained to follow, at least to some extent, for the rest of your life. I believe that children learn separately how to behave in each of their environments and with each of the important people in their lives.

The learning device that humans come equipped with doesn't operate on the principle that what worked in one context will work equally well in another. The baby who learns that his mother will pick him up and feed him when he cries can't assume that his cries will have the same effect on his father or his sister or the kids at the day-care center.

It would be foolish of him to make that assumption, and he doesn't. The human mind is very good at making fine distinctions and at storing things in separate bins. Researchers have looked to see whether children who are dominated by older siblings at home are more likely to be dominated by their peers at school, and the answer is no, they aren't.

Similarly, children who fight all the time with their siblings are not more likely to have stormy relationships with their peers. A baby who behaves in a somber, subdued fashion with his depressed mother will behave normally with a caregiver who is not depressed. A baby who has learned to kick her left foot in order to jiggle a mobile hanging over her crib will stare up at the mobile cluelessly if the crib is moved to another room.

A child who is a troublemaker at home may be well-behaved in school, or vice versa. I'm not saying that an individual's behavior in one situation is uncorrelated with that individual's behavior in a different situation: I'm saying that what the individual learned in one situation doesn't carry over to a different situation. Learning isn't the only thing that determines behavior: behavior is influenced by genetic factors as well, and our genome goes with us wherever we go.

What we learned at home we can leave at home, but what we were born with we always have with us. The timid child tends to behave in a timid fashion in every environment. It was recently demonstrated that this consistency of behavior is due almost entirely to the genetic component of timidity. The other reason why there is sometimes a correlation between behavior in different environments is that there is a good deal of similarity in the environments themselves.

Many of the behaviors children learn at home—speaking English, saying please and thank you, not taking things that don't belong to them—work equally well outside the home. Most of the attitudes and values that people think they got from their parents—"Be honest," "Trust in God," "Work hard," whatever—are the values of the society as a whole, or of the subculture they grew up in.

You might have learned these things at home to begin with, but the reason you took them with you, the reason you kept them, is that they agreed with what you encountered outside the home. But you were telling me what was wrong with some kinds of birth order studies. We were talking about what happens when you have people make personality judgments of their siblings, or of themselves relative to their siblings.

What you get when you use these methods is a picture of how people behave with, or how they feel about, the members of the family they grew up in. I don't doubt that birth order influences how siblings think and feel about each other and about their parents, and how they behave in the family setting. What I doubt is that people drag these effects along with them wherever they go.

The kid who's bossed around by his older sister at home might find that he's the largest and strongest kid in his nursery school classroom. It wouldn't make sense for him to behave the same way with his classmates as he does with his sister, and he doesn't behave the same way. This is true even at nursery-school age. The idea that learned behavior is specific to the situation in which it is learned may be the most important idea in my book, because it resolves so many discrepancies in the research data, and so many discrepancies between the data and people's everyday observations.

It explains why you do find birth order effects if you ask people to compare themselves to their siblings, but you don't find them if you give people a neutral kind of test—a test free of family associations. It also explains why most people believe in birth order effects. You aren't likely to know someone's birth order unless you've seen them in the context of their family.

When people think about birth order, they think about the families they know well: their own brothers and sisters, other relatives, the kids next door. But these are people they've seen mainly in a family context, behaving the way they behave with their siblings and parents. Try guessing the birth order of people you know fairly well but haven't seen in a family setting.

I'll bet you do no better than chance! The idea of context-specific learning can also explain why people believe so strongly in parental influence. After all, when you see a parent and a child together you can see that the parent is influencing the child! You cansee the child responding to the parent's praise or criticism or method of discipline or lack thereof.

What you're less likely to see is that this child will behave differently in environments that aren't associated with the parent. Or, if you do notice that the child behaves differently, the nurture assumption causes you to believe that the way the child behaves with the parent must somehow be more important or more lasting. HARRIS: Well, the way children behave outside their parents' home is certainly more lasting, because that's where they're going to spend their adult lives.

But I'm not saying that the way they behave at home is unimportant. This is one of the ways that parents do have an influence: they can determine, to a large extent, how their children will behave at home. But they can't determine how their children will behave when they're not at home. It maylook as though they can, but I believe the correlations that we notice are due mainly to genetic effects.

Children carry their genes along with them wherever they go, and they got their genes from their parents. For example, Harris denies that the message of 'The Nurture Assumption' is that "Parents are not important. Harris claims that a happy home life in itself is a positive good—not because it necessarily will determine a happy adulthood.

She married Charles S. Harris in ; they had two daughters one adopted and four grandchildren. Since Harris had suffered from a chronic autoimmune disorder , diagnosed as a combination of lupus and systemic sclerosis. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.

Wikiquote Wikidata item. American psychology researcher — Brooklyn, New York , U. Middletown, New Jersey , U. Early life and education [ edit ]. Research: — [ edit ]. Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption [ edit ].