Judith Rich Harris

Judith Rich Harris ( February 10, 1938 - December 29, 2018 ) was an American psychologist . She became known as a proponent of the theory that children are not so much influenced by the upbringing of their parents as by the peer groups .

Life

Harris attended high school in Tucson and then initially studied at the University of Arizona . In 1959 she graduated from Brandeis University . In 1961 she received a Masters in Psychology from Harvard University . 1961–62 she worked as a teaching assistant at MIT , 1962–63 as a research assistant at Bolt Beranek and Newman , and 1964–65 as a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania .

Harris married in 1961 and has two children (1966 and 1969). She had suffered from a chronic autoimmune disease , a combination of lupus erythematosus and scleroderma, since 1977 .

job

Between 1981 and 1994, Harris wrote as co-author of textbooks of developmental psychology . In 1994 she began work on a third textbook. In the process, she developed a new theory of childhood development and abandoned the textbook project to write an article for the journal Psychological Review instead . In 1995, her theory began to spread in the book The Nurture Assumption , published in 1998. In 2006 her next book, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality, was published .

In the 1995 article Where Is the Child's Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development and the book The Nurture Assumption , published in 1998 , she put forward the theory that extra-family contacts, i.e. H. Playmates and cliques that influence a person's development significantly more than the family does, i.e. H. Parents and siblings can or that the upbringing of the parents generally has only a minor influence. For example, aggressive behavior of a child with violent parents could also be due to the fact that the behavior was passed on genetically ( behavioral genetics ), which is why the correlations between the personality traits of parents and children do not have to be an indication of the influence of upbringing. Since children identify with other members of their peer group rather than with their parents, the peer groups have a great influence. Harris postulates an influence of the parents' decisions only indirectly, since the parents e.g. B. significantly influence the choice of peer groups.

reception

In 1998 she received the George A. Miller Award from the American Psychological Association for the article . Linguist Steven Pinker expected The Nurture Assumption to be a turning point in the history of psychology. According to Ropert Sapolsky , the book is based on solid science. Simon Baron-Cohen praised the book as refreshing.

The book was viewed with skepticism by the majority of scholars. Jerome Kagan criticized Harris' weighting of survey-based studies, even though they were often inconsistent with observations. Richard Niolon stated that Harris sometimes confuses correlation with causality, relies too much on dubious data, and oversimplifies matters. Nevertheless, he supported her view of the strong influence of the peer groups. Wendy Williams (Cornell University) referred to studies according to which upbringing has a significant influence on cognitive abilities, among other things.

Publications (selection)

• Where Is the Child's Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development. ( Memento of January 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) In: Psychological Review. Volume 102, No. 3, pp. 458-489.
• The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do . Free Press, 1998, ISBN 0-684-84409-5 . (German: Is education senseless? Rowohlt, 2000, ISBN 3-498-02949-5 .) Revised and updated edition: Free Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4391-0165-0 .
• No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality . WW Norton & Company, 2006, ISBN 0-393-05948-0 . (German: Everyone is different: The riddle of individuality . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2007, ISBN 978-3-421-04235-4 .)
• with Tony Woolfson (Ed.): The quotable Jung . Princeton University, Press 2016, ISBN 978-0-691-15559-3 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Judith Rich Harris in the catalog of the German National Library
• Harris' personal website
• Michael Gassmann: Review: Non-fiction book: I reject immorality. In: FAZ.net . March 21, 2000 (to: Judith Rich Harris: "Is upbringing pointless?" Parents' impotence ). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Katharine Q. Seelye: Judith Rich Harris, 80, Dies; Author Played Down the Role of Parents . In: The New York Times . January 1, 2019, ISSN  0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed January 21, 2019]).
2. ^ RIP, Judith Rich Harris: The Woman Who Showed Us How Little Parents Matter. In: National Review. December 31, 2018, accessed January 21, 2019 (American English). 
3. ^ John Brockman: Judith Rich Harris : 1938-2018. In: Edge.org. January 9, 2019, accessed January 21, 2019 . 
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Sharon Begley: The Parent Trap. In: Newsweek. 1998, accessed January 1, 2019 . 
5. ^ Simon Baron-Cohen Peering into a child's priorities. In: Nature. No. 398, April 22, 1999, pp. 675-677.
6. ↑ Jerome Kagan: A Parent's Influence Is Peerless. In: Harvard Education Letter.
7. ↑ Richard Niolon on The Nurture Assumption ( Memento of October 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) 12/99.