The Nurture Assumption

Judith Rich Harris was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 10, 1938. She received a bachelor's degree in psychology from Brandeis University in 1959 and a master's in psychology from Harvard University in 1961. She was dismissed from the doctoral program at Harvard. She worked briefly as a teaching assistant at M.I.T. and as a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania. She later worked as a research assistant for Bell Labs.

Harris suffered from a chronic autoimmune disorder. Eventually the severity of her illness kept her housebound and she became a textbook writer. While writing college textbooks on child development, she realized she didn't believe what she was telling readers about why children turn out the way they do. She believed that children are influenced more by their genes and peers than by their parents. She wrote her theory up for an academic journal and won a prize from the American Psychological Association. She wrote books on the subject including The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do and No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality. She died on December 29, 2018 at the age of 80.

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