A roundabout success

Judith Rich Harris ’59 is widely regarded in the psychology community for her research into the factors that influence child development. In 1998, Harris published The Nurture Assumption, an outgrowth of a paper she published in the prestigious Psychological Review journal, a considerable feat at the time given that she was unaffiliated with a university and suffers from an autoimmune disease. In 2006, Harris went on to publish a second book that refined her previous conclusions in The Nurture Assumption entitled No Two Alike. She has become known in academic circles as one who has challenges many of the myths regarding parental involvement as a supreme factor in a child’s eventual personality, opting for a nuanced approach that takes into account environmental variables that extend beyond the household and genetic factors. In an email interview with the Justice, Harris reflected on her dynamic career as a research psychologist.


JustFeatures: Where does your passion for psychology stem from?

Judith Rich Harris: I probably could have developed a passion for just about any science. But what’s particularly interesting about psychology is that people have pre-existing opinions on its subject matter, and in many cases these pre-existing opinions are flat-out wrong! By nature, I’m a skeptic. I don’t accept conventional beliefs simply because I heard them from someone in authority—I want to see the data! As it happens, in my area of interest there’s plenty of data.

JF: How did your time at Brandeis prepare you for your career and your life of psychology research and publishing?

JRH: What I found out at Brandeis ... is that I love collecting and processing data. My thesis advisor was [Prof. Emeritus] Ricardo Morant (PSYC), and he set me a problem that involved testing people (my classmates) in a visual perception task. The experiment produced lots of data. After each testing session, I would rush back to my room in Renfield Hall in order to plot the latest batch of numbers on my graphs.

JF: What did you do upon graduating from Brandeis?

JRH: Became a graduate student in Harvard’s Department of Psychology. At that time the Department of Psychology was exclusively experimental; its most prominent professor was B. F. Skinner. The other kind of psychology—which includes social, clinical, developmental, and personality—was in a separate department called Social Relations. We grad students in Psychology looked down our noses at the “soft-headed” types in Soc Rel. They no doubt held us in equal disdain.

JF: Why did the psychology department at Harvard reject you from their Ph.D program?

JRH: The letter I got from George A. Miller, the acting chairman of the department, started out by saying that they had no doubt I was “capable of doing satisfactory work in lecture courses and in seminars.” The difficulty, he said, had to do with my “promise as an experimental scientist”—in particular, with what the department perceived as my lack of “originality and independence.”

JF: What did you do after you graduated from Harvard with a master’s degree?

JRH: I worked as a teaching assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then as a research assistant at Bolt Beranek and Newman. After 10 years as a full-time mother of two daughters, I became a research assistant again, this time at Bell Labs.

My younger daughter was in first grade when I developed intractable back trouble—the first sign of what turned out to be a serious and chronic autoimmune disorder. I was bedridden for a time—had to give up the job at Bell Labs—and was looking for something I could do in bed. Then a friend at Rutgers University, Marilyn Shaw, gave me one of her papers—an experimental study of something called “visual search.” Marilyn hired me to edit it—to improve the writing style. But she also gave me the data from the experiment, which I found much more interesting. I spent more than a year happily playing with the data.

Then I heard that a textbook publishing company, Prentice Hall, was looking for someone to write two chapters of an introductory psychology book. I applied for the job and was hired. They liked the chapters I wrote so they asked me to co-author (with a professor at SUNY Stony-Brook) a textbook on developmental psychology—one of those fields that Harvard classified as Soc Rel, not Psychology. I didn’t know beans about developmental psychology but accepted the job—it was something I could do in bed.

By then I was tired of being a co-author, so I decided to start afresh and write a new development textbook on my own.

On a cold winter afternoon in 1994—I was alone in the house, reading a journal article on adolescent delinquency—I suddenly had an idea that led me to re-examine the foundations of developmental psychology.

JF: What was your initial motivation for writing the Psychological review article that would eventually become The Nurture Assumption?

JRH: One of the basic tenets of this field is the belief that the most important part of a child’s environment is the child’s parents—the belief that, if something goes wrong with the child, it was probably the parents’ fault. What I realized, after looking closely at the evidence, was that this belief is nothing more than a cultural myth.

At that point, it didn’t even occur to me to write a book aimed at a general audience. How could a nobody like me, with no Ph.D. and no affiliation, expect to get an article into one of psychology’s most prestigious journals, which had an acceptance rate of 15 percent? It was sheer chutzpah, but I figured I’d give it a try. Amazingly, my paper was accepted. It appeared in the journal in July, 1995.

JF: What were the difficulties involved in writing and research at the same time you were struggling with illness? Did you view your work as a way to distract yourself?

JRH: By the time I started work on the Psych Review paper, I was no longer bedridden, but I was (and still am) very limited in my ability to do any kind of physical activity. Fortunately, there are work-arounds. I sent out many postcards and letters—in paper mail, remember that?—to researchers at universities, asking for copies of their papers.

JF: What did it mean to you to receive the George A. Miller Award, given that the psychology department at Harvard rejected you from their Ph.D program while George A. Miller was the chair of the Psychology department?

JRH: In my acceptance speech, I told the audience the story of having been kicked out of the Harvard Psychology Department by George A. Miller and added, “I don’t think you will ever have a recipient of the George A. Miller Award who is happier to receive it than I am!”

JF: What about the reaction in academia to your theory surprised you most? Did you anticipate that it would be as controversial as it was?

JRH: Yes, I anticipated that The Nurture Assumption would be controversial. But I didn’t anticipate the amount of media attention it would receive, or the fact that every periodical in the country would voice an opinion!

JF: What are some of the major points you communicate in The Nurture Assumption?

JRH: It’s not that “parents don’t matter”—of course they matter, though not in the all the ways you assumed! And it’s not that parents don’t influence their children’s behavior—they do influence their children’s behavior at home. The catch is that much of what children learn at home is of little or no use to them in the world outside the home. Children are perfectly capable of adjusting their behavior to the setting in which they find themselves, so the behaviors that don’t work outside the home are quickly dropped and new ones acquired.

Parents are often surprised to discover that their children behave quite differently in school. I remember, when my children were young, going to Back-to-School Night at their school. Parents would talk to their children’s teacher and come away shaking their heads in disbelief. “Was she talking about my child?” they’d say.

JF: Some misunderstand your book as one that claims childhood development is strictly determined by “nature.” Can you explain in more detail what your conclusions actually prove?

JRH: No one—certainly not me—thinks personality is entirely inherited! So the question is: What, besides genes, shapes an individual’s personality?
The problem is that genes tend to confuse the issue. If competent parents have competent children, is it nature or nurture? Do competent parents teach their children how to manage their lives, or do they pass on this trait in their genes? Because ordinary observation can’t distinguish between these alternatives, special research methods have been devised to disentangle them. The use of these methods led to an unexpected conclusion: Most of the environmental factors that were thought to be important ... have no discernible effects on the offspring’s adult personality, once the effects of heredity are taken into account.

To be honest, I didn’t do a very good job of solving it in The Nurture Assumption, though that book does show that the conventional beliefs about childhood, and the conventional research methods used to back up these beliefs, don’t stand up to scrutiny.

I took another stab at solving the mystery in my second book, No Two Alike. The theory presented in N2A is an enhanced version of the one in TNA and fills in some of the gaps. It’s based in part on an idea that comes from the field of evolutionary psychology—namely, that different psychological functions are carried out by different mental organs, often called modules or systems (as in “the visual system”), which work more or less independently.

JF: Although of course your research is based on objective study, are there any subjective personal experiences you can recall that confirm your findings or inspire your work?

JRH: While I was at Harvard, I lived in a rooming house in Cambridge. It was owned by a Russian couple; they both spoke English with a heavy foreign accent. Even without hearing them speak, you could somehow tell they were foreigners. But their three young children, who ranged in age from five to nine, looked like perfectly ordinary Americans and spoke with no foreign accent at all. I didn’t think of the Russian couple and their children for many years but they must have remained in a corner of my mind, ready to speak up again when the time came for them to be heard.

—Compiled by Jaime Kaiser and
Casey Pearlman 

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