Judith Rich Harris was born February 10, 1938, and spent the first part of her childhood moving around with her family from one part of the country to another. Her parents eventually settled in Tucson, Arizona, where the climate permitted her father (invalided by an autoimmune disease called ankylosing spondylitis) to live in reasonable comfort. Harris graduated from Tucson High School and attended the University of Arizona and Brandeis University. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis in 1959 and was awarded the Lila Pearlman Prize in psychology. In 1961 she received a master's degree in psychology from Harvard University.

Harris has been married since 1961 to Charles S. Harris; they have two daughters, born in 1966 and 1969, and three grandchildren, born in 1996, 1999, and 2001.

Before her children were born, Harris worked as a teaching assistant in psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1961-1962) and as a research assistant at Bolt Beranek and Newman (1962-1963) and the University of Pennsylvania (1963-1965).

Since 1977, Harris has suffered from health problems due to a chronic autoimmune disorder that has been diagnosed as a combination of lupus and systemic sclerosis.

While bedridden for a period of time in the late 1970s, Harris worked out a mathematical model of visual search; this work was published in two articles in the journal Perception and Psychophysics (see publication list below). From 1981 to 1994 she worked as a writer of textbooks in developmental psychology. She is the senior author of The Child (Prentice-Hall, 1984, 1987, 1991) and Infant and Child (1992). In 1994 she had begun work on a new development textbook, without a co-author this time, when she had the idea of group socialization theory. She abandoned the textbook and instead wrote an article for the Psychological Review. Work on The Nurture Assumption began in 1995 and was completed in early 1998.

Harris is a member of the Society for Research in Child Development, the American Psychological Society, and Phi Beta Kappa. In 1998 she received the George A. Miller Award from Division 1 of the American Psychological Association for her article entitled "Where Is the Child's Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development" (Psychological Review, 1995). This award is given to an outstanding article, particularly one that makes linkages between diverse fields of psychology.

Publications (print)

Harris, J. R. (1995). Where is the child's environment? A group socialization theory of development. Psychological Review, 102, 458-489.

Harris, J. R. (1997). Book review: The Sociology of Childhood, by W. A. Corsaro. Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography, 71(3), 83.

Harris, J. R. (1998). The nurture assumption: Why children turn out the way they do. New York: Free Press.

Harris, J. R. (1998, September 27). The value of nurture -- and of an open mind. Boston Globe, p. C3.

Harris, J. R. (1998, October 11). Nature or nurture: Parents have no effects on the way kids grow up. Syndicated op-ed, Scripps News Service.

Harris, J. R. (1998, November). Why children turn out the way they do. L.A. Parent, p. 66-67.

Harris, J. R. (1998). The trouble with assumptions (commentary on Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad). Psychological Inquiry, 9, p. 294-297.

Harris, J. R. (1999). How to succeed in childhood. The Wilson Quarterly, 23(1), p. 30-37.

Harris, J. R. (1999, April 25). Don't blame the parents; it's mainly the peers. Los Angeles Times, p. M5.

Harris, J. R. (1999). How many environments does a child have?   Harvard Education Letter, 15(3), 8.

Harris, J. R. (1999). Is it true that parenting has no influence on children's adult personalities? The author of The Nurture Assumption replies to Milton Spett. NJ-ACT Newsletter, Special Supplement, May issue.

Harris, J. R. (1999). How to succeed in childhood (reprint of Wilson Quarterly article). In S. J. Ceci & W. Williams (Eds.), The nature-nurture debate: The essential readings. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Harris, J. R. (2000). Parents have no lasting influence on the personality or intelligence of their children. Essay in Hilgard's Introduction to Psychology (13th ed.), by R. L Atkinson, R. C. Atkinson, E. E. Smith, D. J. Bem, & S. Nolen-Hoeksema. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace. Also in: Fundamentals of Psychology (1st ed.), by E. E. Smith, D. J. Bem, & S. Nolen-Hoeksema. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace.

Harris, J. R. (2000). The outcome of parenting: What do we really know? (commentary on Lykken). Journal of Personality, 68(3), 625-637.

Harris, J. R. (2000). Context-specific learning, personality, and birth order. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 174-177.

Harris, J. R. (2000). Socialization, personality development, and the child's environments: Comment on Vandell (2000). Developmental Psychology, 36(6), 699-710.

Harris, J. R. (2001, March 8). How Can We Tell Which Teen Will Kill? We Can't. Los Angeles Times, p. B11.

Harris, J. R. (2001, April 24). Day Care Isn't Boot Camp for Bullies. Los Angeles Times, p. B9.

Harris, J. R. (2002). Beyond the nurture assumption: Testing hypotheses about the child's environment. In J. G. Borkowski, S. L. Ramey, & M. Bristol-Power (Eds.), Parenting and the child's world: Influences on academic, intellectual, and socioemotional development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Harris, J. R. (in press). Finding out what makes us the way we are: Developmental science in the twenty-first century. In J. Brockman (Ed.), The next fifty years. New York: Vintage.

Harris, J. R. (in press). Personality and birth order: Explaining the differences between siblings (commentary on Townsend). Politics and the Life Sciences.

Online Publications

Harris, J. R. (1995). Individual differences within human groups: Commentary on Caporael on group-selection. Psycoloquy, 6(40).

Harris, J. R. (1996). A defense of behavioral genetics by a non-behavioral geneticist: Reply to Caporael on group-selection. Psycoloquy, 7(13).

Harris, J. R. (1997, October). Challenging the nurture assumption (op-ed essay), The Psychology Place

Harris, J. R. (1998, June). How is personality formed? (commentary on an interview with Frank J. Sulloway). Edge

Harris, J. R. (1999, June). Children don't do things half way: a talk with Judith Rich Harris. Edge

Harris, J. R. (2001, May 20). Why are birth order effects dependent on context? http://xchar.home.att.net/tna/birth-order/context.htm

Harris, J. R. (2001, September 3). http://xchar.home.att.net/tna/birth-order/sibdiff.htm

Harris, J. R. (1998). Don't blame your parents: The nurture assumption on trial. Award address presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco. Full text posted on Gifts of Speech.

Harris, J. R. (1999). Beyond the nurture assumption: Testing hypotheses about the child's environment. Keynote address at Conference on Parenting and the Child's World: Multiple Influences on Intellectual and Social-Emotional Development, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda.

Harris, J. R. (2000). Research on Child Development: What We Can Learn from Medical Research. Invited paper presented at The Brookings Children's Roundtable Project, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC.