Judith Rich Harris (1938–2018)

Judith Rich Harris lays out her argument for group socialization theory in this comprehensive study. Her wit and self-effacing attitude kept me engaged with the book and she takes great care to explain the missteps of other researchers who, despite having mounds of data, have confused correlation with causation. The Nurture Assumption tackles a widely held belief of parent's influence on their children and as such requires a systematic analysis of all the studies available. It's a rare book that can be such an enjoyable and informative read.… (mehr)

I was moved to pick up this book because Steven Pinker mentioned it with fulsome praise in The Blank Slate. Author Judith Rich Harris describes herself as “an unemployed writer of college textbooks” who was “kicked out of Harvard without a PhD.” Thus, for someone with marginal academic credentials her theory of child development is audacious: that part of children’s personality that is not explained by heredity (and the idea that heredity has anything to do with personality is also still heretical) is formed by the child’s peer group(s), not parents. She calls this “group socialization theory”.


I have to say I find this idea appealing. I’m not a parent, but I am an offspring; my memories of my childhood and adolescent years certainly seem to confirm that my behavior was much more intended to establish status in my group rather than please my parents. Just because I do find it appealing, I have to be a little careful about giving it a glowing endorsement.


Harris’ writing style is pleasantly readable, certainly not the kind of prose you usually get from psychologists. That, again, might be a little handicap to her acceptance by academics; although The Nurture Assumption is heavily referenced, Harris doesn’t use footnotes; instead the references are linked to page numbers. While this certainly makes the book easy to follow, it also makes it hard to look up the sources for Harris’ statements.


I also find the book could have used tighter editing. Harris’ argument is simple enough:


* Conventional wisdom holds that the dominant influence on child development is parental upbringing.


* However, studies that purport to confirm this are flawed; they fail to correct for heredity; or they fail to establish the direction of causality (are children well-behaved because they receive a lot of hugs, or do children receive a lot of hugs because they are well-behaved); or they fail to appreciate that behavior outside the home can be different from inside the home; or they’re just plain badly done.


* Therefore, “group socialization theory” is a viable alternative, and


* Various adequately controlled studies support “group socialization theory”


The problem is Harris doesn’t lay out her arguments that way; instead she wanders all over. The Nurture Assumption is sort of an anecdotal meta-analysis, with Harris plucking various studies out of the air that support her position and criticizing (with considerably more restraint than many of her critics) those that don’t.


There are, admittedly, a lot of interesting anecdotes to tell: the boy who was dumped for five years on a Tibetan monastery by his parents and who thus grew up “a white Tibetan”; various comments on language development (including the claim that bilingual education will not work); various comments on the way children are raised in different cultures (Mayans are horrified that Americans don’t take their babies to bed with them; there is no “adolescence” among the Yanomamö: you go from being a child to an adult at 14), and considerable personal detail on Harris’ own children.


Harris’ also provides a lot to offend both the left and the right. The left will be annoyed by her contention that there really is a difference between boys and girls personality and socialization, and that heredity has a major influence on personality; the right will be upset to find that there is no discernable difference between children with same-sex parents and those with conventional families, and that once you allow for economics there’s no difference between children of single moms and those with two parents.


The only place where Harris has difficulty making “group socialization theory” fit the data is with divorced families, where studies do suggest children have problems. Harris dances around this; she suggests, again, that causality has been reversed (do children grow up badly when their parents divorce, or do bad children make parents divorce); she argues that perhaps researchers fail to account for the change in peer-group status caused by divorce; or maybe it has to do with the disruption caused by moving after a divorce and thus having to merge with a different peer group. There’s a couple of things that I’d like to investigate more; apparently divorce remains a problem for kids even if the mom remarries, but families where the mom is a widow rather than a divorcee don’t have similar difficulties.


The Nurture Assumption does offer some advice (Harris is tentative about offering it). Parents have some influence in choosing their offspring’s peer group by living in a “good” neighborhood with “good” schools (and thus, a “good” peer group). Parents should also accept that it’s a good idea to see that children “fit in” with their peer group in terms of clothing and behavior; she doesn’t go so far as to say that if you’re ten-year-old wants to dress like a hooker, you should let her, but that’s the implication. (I have a personal anecdote about this; when I was in second grade Mom bought me pants with vertical black and white stripes. While I lacked the vocabulary and rhetorical skills to explain the problem, I was pretty sure I’d be the laughing stock of Madison Elementary if I wore those to school. Tears, screaming, and spanking ensued, but eventually Mom gave the pants away and I didn’t have to wear them).


Overall I have to rate The Nurture Assumption pretty highly. Even if “group socialization theory” is wrong or incomplete, there’s still at lot to think about and a lot more books to read. No problem there.… (mehr)

Judith Harris, author of the previously reviewed The Nurture Assumption, follows up with another book on personality development, No Two Alike. This has the same strengths and flaws as the previous work; Ms. Harris makes good points but doesn’t present her arguments in an organized fashion. In this case, she’s going after explanations for human personality; again nature/nurture; birth order; genetics; and etc. She uses the unfortunate analogy to a detective story – which means rather than a dry but clear exposition we get a whole book full of red herrings before Harris explains her hypotheses: human personality is formed by the combination of innate systems and experience. The innate systems are a relationship system that allows us to tell family from strangers, a group socialization system that allows us to “fit in” to a group, and a status system that allows us to determine where we rank in various social groups. And she leaves this as a hypothesis, challenging the field to falsify it; i.e. the “detective story” is left with a principal suspect but no arrest or conviction.


Still, despite the wandering around and the imperfectly satisfying conclusion there’s a lot to like about No Two Alike. With The Nurture Assumption, Harris became the academic psychology equivalent of the pajamaheddin who exposed the CBS/Rather Bush National Guard memo hoax. In No Two Alike a good part of the book’s first few chapters is devoted to Harris’ response to various academic attacks. Harris is confined to home with a debilitating disease and does her research from there; it was very imprudent for more traditional academics to dis’ somebody who is obviously very smart and who has a lot of time on her hands. Her detractors quoted various studies and ongoing but not yet published research (she fits this into her “detective story” theme by citing Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, which features a Scotland Yard inspector solving a very old case – the murder of the Princes in the Tower – while confined to a hospital bed). Harris tracked down all the studies thrown at her and demonstrated that they either didn’t say what the critics claimed they said or that they had ignored various confounding factors; and the not yet published research never showed up in her inbox even when repeatedly requested. And she names names, which has to be disconcerting for the named.


Other features include a nice dissection of “birth order” personality theories; the observation (also made frequently in The Nurture Assumption) that psychology researchers frequently fail to establish the direction of causality (are children well behaved because they get a lot of parental affection, or do they get a lot of parental affection because they are well behaved?); and overgeneralization of some studies (parenting methods that improve behavior at home do not improve behavior elsewhere, and vice versa).


One big improvement on The Nuture Assumption: endnotes rather than page number references, making it much easier to check Harris’ data.… (mehr)