NZ Conservative

This article was previously posted at GM’s Place in October 2009:

After working a number of years co-authoring textbooks on developmental psychology, Judith Rich Harris came to the conclusion that fifty years of socialization research based on the assumption that parents are the primary causative agents in the formation of their child’s personality and abilities was based upon an assumption that the evidence does not support. In 1995, she published her conclusions in the journal Psychological Review (Where is the child’s environment? A group socialization theory of development, Psychological Review, 102, 458 – 489). She wrote: “Do parents have any important long-term effects on the development of their child’s personality? This article examines the evidence and concludes that the answer is no.”

Ironically, Harris won a prize for that article in 1997, the George A. Miller Award, named after the man who thirty-seven years earlier as Chairman of Harvard’s Psychology Department, had kicked her out of Harvard’s Ph.D. program in Psychology, claiming that Harris would never amount to much.

In 1999, Harris published The Nurture Assumption, where she more fully stated her thesis in terms more easily understood by the general public. The nurture assumption is the hypothesis that nurture, primarily parental nurture, is the primary factor in personality development. The hypothesis has lost ground in recent years because genetic research, particularly twin studies, has tended to give more weight to nature. Harris’s conclusions about the nurture assumption were, in fact, influenced by such studies done by behavioral geneticists on identical and fraternal twins, and adoptive siblings, raised in the same and different environments, which demonstrated “either that parents have no effect or that they have different effects on each of the siblings” (p. 38). Furthermore, the disposition of the child has as much effect upon the parent’s style of parenting as vice versa. As Harris wrote: “The problem is that parent-to-child effects – the kind needed by proponents of the nurture assumption to account for the differences in the children’s personalities – are very difficult to distinguish from child-to-parent effects” (p. 382). Contrary to the “style-of-parenting” research of Diana Baumrind, most parents do not have a unified parenting style, but rather tailor their parenting style to the individual needs and personalities of their children. It is sort of a chicken-or-egg question, but research appears to support the contention that children are born with a unique nature or disposition, and parents react to the child’s nature as much as the child reacts to the parent’s. Harris contends, “Parents do not treat their children all alike; therefore, each child has different experiences within the home” (Ibid.). If my wife and her siblings are any indication, it’s almost as if each child has a different set of parents, even though they grew up in the same home!

I should add that Harris’s research concludes that a child’s peer group actually has more influence on the formation of personality, certainly by the time they reach adolescence. (Read the book to find out why, but one example is the fact that the children of immigrants prefer to speak the language of their peers, not of their parents.) This is Harris’s theory of group socialization. Another example is that in tribal cultures, the older children take on much or even most of the parenting and socialization roles, once a child is old enough to walk, and toddle after them.

I think these findings are quite relevant for conservatives because they support the views of evolutionary psychology and contradict the views of social constructionism (and hence, social engineering), which are so passionately defended by the Left. Both my undergraduate studies in history and philosophy (R.G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History) and my graduate studies in psychology (Freud, Lacan, phenomenology, and post-structuralism) were permeated with the ideology of social constructionism. Even my politically conservative graduate advisor firmly believed that what mattered in psychology and personality development was family dynamics, and not biology, which was consistent with his roots in Freud and phenomenology. The whole notion of “my mother made me do it,” has much of its origins in Freud, and this has carried over into the discipline of psychotherapy. What are the implications for the field of therapy if Harris is right, and parenting is not responsible for who we turn out to be? It certainly calls into question much of the emphasis on the recollections of childhood characteristic of trauma therapy and psychoanalysis.

I was first introduced to the ideas of evolutionary psychology after seeing Steven Pinker speak on Book-TV about his book, The Blank Slate (2002). I read Pinker’s book, which was an attack on the whole notion, originating with John Locke’s tabla rasa that babies come into the world as blank slates, to be wholly formed by their environments. Remember that the behaviorist Watson claimed that if you gave him any dozen infants to raise, he could form them into whatever he wanted – doctor, lawyer, or plumber — regardless of their biologically given abilities and predispositions. Coincidentally, Pinker wrote the foreword to Harris’s book, which was well-received by evolutionary psychologists. In contemporary academia, Pinker’s theory is particularly anathema to radical feminists and other radical leftists, with an agenda of molding our nation’s youth into good little politically correct comrades. According to the former, there really is no psychological difference between males and females, and no physical differences other than a slight anatomical divergence. Sexual identities are socially constructed according to these feminists, which is why they insist that boys and girls are not given any gender specific toys or even clothes to wear. So far, the results of this social experiment have been abysmal (see for example, Chuck Colson, “The Legacy of Radical Feminism,” townhall.com, June 27, 2008 ). Coincidentally, while radical feminists and gay fellow travelers will admit no biological differences between males and females, they contend that all homosexuality is biological! It would be a waste of time to take such nonsense seriously if it wasn’t for the fact that such nonsense is taken seriously on most American university campuses.

For an excellent account of the research on male-female differences I recommend Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Essential Difference: The Truth about the Male & Female Brain (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Baron-Cohen contends that psychological differences between males and females exist on a continuum with males predominating as systemizers and females as empathizers. Baron-Cohen, an expert on autism, posits that the person with autism, which is 3 to 4 times more prevalent in males, is an example of an extreme systemizer who relates better to things than to people, whereas extreme empathizers have the opposite trait. A key word here is continuum, which can be graphed on a bell curve: while there are examples of females who are good systemizers (with excellent math and science abilities, for example), and males who are good empathizers (making good therapists), these exemplars are exceptions and not the majority. Former Harvard University President Lawrence Summers was forced to resign his position for even suggesting that there might be such differences. Even though research tends to support Summers’s position, the left never lets facts get in the way of ideology.

To conclude my review of The Nurture Assumption, I should add a few caveats: First, I do think that family dynamics are still important, but not in the sense of who we are, which can more readily be accounted for by genetics, but rather in terms of what we have to deal with. In other words, what kind of mother and father we had, and what our relationships with our siblings were like, do carry on into our adult life, as models for relationships. Second, I still believe that parents matter and that most children do better in two-parent, intact families that provide a “good enough” environment. I think this is borne out by the data. Finally, I might add that because of Hitler, and the history of racism, there is a lot of fear around the notion that who we are is even 50% a result of our genetic makeup (the other 50% being the result of environment). Also, the geneticist view of personality development undermines the premise for a lot of social and educational programs (or at least demands that they be rethought and revised), particularly those programs whose purpose is to mold youth along certain politically correct models. For those two reasons, a leftist dominated academia offers stiff resistance to a theory that could undermine their basic premises about human nature.