About the Author

Judith Rich Harris is an independent investigator and a former writer of textbooks in child development. She lives in New Jersey with her husband.

Reviews

"A display of scientific courage and imagination." -- William Salatan - New York Times "As she did in The Nurture Assumption, independent scholar Harris makes waves again with a new theory of personality to explain why no two people are alike." -- Kirkus Reviews

"A display of scientific courage and imagination." -- William Salatan - New York Times "As she did in The Nurture Assumption, independent scholar Harris makes waves again with a new theory of personality to explain why no two people are alike." -- Kirkus Reviews

In this follow-up to her controversial 1998 book, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Harris presents what may be the best personality theory since Sigmund Freud's. Why do identical twins with the same genes and raised in the same household grow up with different personalities? According to Harris, adept brains and complex culture account for the difference. With neither a doctorate nor a university behind her, Harris more than compensates with intelligence, dogged research, lively writing, a love of mystery, and droll humor. She wrestles bulging files of research data into shape, in the process taking down some champions of the old order, including Freud, James Watson, Eleanor Maccoby, and Frank Sulloway. Her three-systems theory of personality postulates a modular brain that must from infancy learn the particulars of relationships along with abstract principles of language and socialization. Harris makes behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology enjoyable and accessible to general readers as well as scholars. Essential for general and academic libraries.-E. James Lieberman, George Washington Univ. Sch. of Medicine, Washington, DC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.