No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality [Hardcover]

 

 

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For someone nearly housebound and bereft of academic qualifications, Harris is an imposing figure in the world of social behaviour. Her earlier book having raised a storm of controversy among academics, this one will extend the arena to family relations. There is probably no greater shibboleth than the notion that parents are wholly responsible for how their children develop. In this book, Harris demolishes that idea. She applies the mode of a "detective story" to line up evidence and possible perpetrators. Although much of the focus in this book relies on the study of twins, she also raises the issue of birth order and how each of us interacts at home, school and social contact. With an easy, conversational style and use of much evidence, Harris has once again built a cogent and convincing argument.

As with every "detective novel", the investigator must eliminate possible perpetrators. Harris defines a number of "red herrings" that she must dispense with prior to presenting her own thesis of what drives our relationships with others. Among the outdated or mistaken ideas she tackles are those of Freud and the "blank slate" aficionados. This latter has come to dominate both academic and family thinking about raising offspring. Whatever the shifting fashions of psychology have favoured, the one element long overlooked has been the evolutionary basis of family development. The growing field of evolutionary psychology is helping to fill that gap. Harris draws on many scholars of the past generation in support of her desire to call attention to our genetic roots. Steven Pinker, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides loom large in her narrative. Skirting the term "sociobiology" as likely too inflammatory, she still pays homage to Edward O. Wilson's efforts to equate the social species of our world.

One of the major targets of her updating of social thinking is the "correlation". It's possible to measure a child's behaviour and that of its family. The flaw in the research has been to assign cause through correlation. Harris contends there's no evidence to support the link. While most families regard themselves as at least guiding their offspring's behaviour, she shows that it's equally likely the child is driving theirs. With nearly half a child's conduct due to genetic drive, attributing traits to parental influence alone has little basis. Moreover, many home behaviours are shed when the child departs the home for school. An entire new set of rules for interaction arise in the classroom and playground. There, the issues of acceptance in various groups become the dominant concern. Classroom performance influences how one is viewed by peers, as is physique, deportment and understanding rank. These are complex issues, strongly interacting. Even sibling rivalry seems simple by comparison. There, the dealings are with only a few in a relatively fixed environment. Outside the home, the situation becomes almost infinitely complex. Yet, the child must learn to adapt to it.

Harris thinks our brains have mechanisms to deal with that complexity. After all, she reminds us, we've had several million years to develop the ability to make those adjustments. The mechanisms she proposes are a trio of "systems". The "Relationship System" begins at home with parents and siblings. It must be greatly enhanced as the child moves from home to school and beyond. Obviously, it must be highly flexible, allowing for rapid change in varying environments. The second, the "Socialisation System" has a foundation in home life, but must be drastically reconfigured when moving from home to school, then in later life. Finally, but hardly least, is the "Status System". "Status" in home life has been dealt with in the "birth order" scenarios put forward by Frank Sulloway. Harris, who challenged Sulloway in her earlier book, completes the task here.

In conclusion, Harris notes that her "Systems" are theoretical. If they lack "hard" evidence to sustain, that is the nature of a new concept. She implores academic and other researchers to take up these questions and pursue them more fully. Not only are the ideas complex and deal with difficult interactions, there are ethical issues to contend with. How do you perform "experiments" in family, school or social structures. Those who have already attempted it, have caused irreparable damage to some subjects. Along with dispensing with "red herrings" then, Harris has constructed a solid base for further investigation. It's a tempting scenario for young readers to consider entering. It's to be hoped they will take up the challenge. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Rich Harris shows yet again that coming at an old topic armed with an evolutionary perspective and an unorthodox and very perceptive mind, vast improvements in our understanding can be achieved. A must read for anyone seriously interested in moving personality psychology out of fantasy land and into the realm of natural science.

This is an outstanding book on social and developmental psychology based primarily on evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience--the new paradigm that's revolutionizing academic psychology. It's engagingly written, authoritative, witty, ingeniously argued, and filled with information and wisdom. Judith Rich Harris is that rare, very rare, individual who is a top academic without a position at a major university, a professor without portfolio, so to speak.

When I first picked this up I almost put it down again. The title "No Two Alike" sounds suspiciously like another feel good, shallow celebration of human diversity. Right. We're all wonderful. Thanks, I needed that. Furthermore, I kind of creeped out at the joined-at-the-heads twins that were the subject near the beginning of the book. In fact I stopped reading from the beginning and put the book aside. When I returned to it, I noticed that chapters six through nine were entitled, The Modular Mind, The Relationship System, The Socialization System, and The Status System. That rekindled my interest.

The idea of the modular mind comes from fairly recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology as understood from an evolutionary perspective. I started reading on page 143 where the chapter on the modular mind begins. What I discovered is that Harris' understanding of who we are and how we got that way begins with evidence from genetics and ends with insights from social psychology. She sees the relationship system as the way we learn to form and maintain relationships with others. The infant begins with a relationship with its mother. Harris states that the child's first job is to get the mother to love her. I have seen this in children and they do it mostly by appealing to the mother's instincts. They are small and helpless with relatively big eyes and soft skin, etc., and so appear to the mother as irresistibly cute. Next they try to win the love of the father. Girls instinctively know that if they win the love of their father they are likely to be safe. They work hard at it. Then come the relationships with others.

And then comes the socialization system. Harris makes a distinction between learning to form relationships and socialization. In the former it's one on one. In the latter we don't so much relate to individuals as to the average of all others. We seek to become like the typical person in our group. We support the group and identify with its values and preoccupations.

Finally comes the status system. This is in some sense at loggerheads with the socialization system. Instead of seeking to be like others, what we want is to be like them only a little better or at least a little better at something. Instead of imitating the styles of others we look at them to read how they rate us.

Harris sees these three systems with our genes interacting over time as forming our personalities. She makes it clear that it is our peer groups that we look to for both our identity and our status. She believes that the primary information we receive does not come from our parents. We adjust to and comform to the values, beliefs and mores of the larger society at the peer group level, not to the values, beliefs and mores of our parents, except insofar as their values are similar to those of the larger group. Furthermore, we tend to discount the opinions of our relatives when assessing our status. (They can be biased!) Instead we look to our peers to tell us how we stand. Harris calls this "mindreading," but what we do is not so much read the minds of our peers as read their behavior, especially their behavior toward us, and deduce our status accordingly. If everybody in the group suddenly turns to look at you when the tough question comes up--guess what? They probably think you are the best person to answer it. When it comes to deciding how to choose up teams for basketball, if their eyes turn to Basketball Jones, you can be fairly sure that they think Basketball Jones knows basketball, or at least she knows how to set up teams.

The complex interactions of these systems in addition to the genetic endowment ensures us that everybody is unique, even identical twins. Harris makes a point of showing how identical twins become differentiated over time through feedback from especially the status system. People need to form mental dossiers on everybody they know, and they do so even with twins; and in doing so they see fine distinctions, and then the distinctions grow. Not only that but one twin will, through happenstance or "environmental noise," as Harris terms it, be ever so slightly more assertive or more confident, and that difference, like a leak in a dike, will grow.

In short this is a terrific book, skillfully and even eloquently written, full of information and deep insights into human nature, well documented and argued in a most convincing manner. It is simply one of the best books on psychology that I have read in quite a while.

Here's a quote from Harris that demonstrates her skill and intelligence: "The desire for status begins early and lasts a lifetime. Old people in nursing homes, well past the point when Viagra can do them any good, still care about their status. In my view, status is an end in itself for humans. The fact that it buys access to desirable sexual partners in adulthood is no doubt one of the evolutionary reasons we are endowed with this motive, but evolution's reasons shouldn't be confused with people's motivations. Status also buys access to desirable things to eat and drink, but the drive to gain status isn't a side effect of hunger or thirst. If anything, hunger and thirst are likely to interfere with the quest for status. Sex can too. Ask Bill Clinton." (p. 256)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Butterflies in stomach stuff...
Harris' envious ability to wed hard empirical data with imaginative theories is breathtaking.
This book is simply superb. Read more

Published 21 months ago by Benjamin D. Bishop

5.0 out of 5 stars Scientific detective
This new book by Judith Rich Harris is again thought provoking. In the book, which is written like a scientific detective, she tries to solve the mystery of individual differences... Read more

Published on 30 Jan 2007 by Coert Visser

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