The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

Judith Rich Harris (1938-2018) was an American researcher and author from New Jersey. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology at Brandeis University and gained fame in scholarly circles for her 1998 book The Nurture Assumption—which prompted renewed debate about the role of parenting in children’s development. This work was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize and republished in 2009. Harris never worked as a researcher before writing her controversial book. In 1960, she had been dismissed from her PhD program at Harvard, but went on to write psychology textbooks, co-writing The Child and Infant and Child.

It was during her research as a textbook writer that Harris became dissatisfied with accepted explanations of the relationship between parenting and human socialization and personality development. She formed a new theory on child development, and first explained it in a 1995 article for “Psychological Review” magazine—for which she was awarded the George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article in General Psychology. Bolstered by this success, she expanded her theory into her book The Nurture Assumption. In it, Harris argues her ideas were helped, not hindered, by her background as a textbook writer: She positions herself as a well-read, unbiased observer of psychology, equally acquainted with old and new forms of research.