ДЖУДИТ РИЧ ХАРРИС И ЕЕ КОНЦЕПЦИЯ СОЦИАЛИЗАЦИИ: КРИТИЧЕСКИЕ АСПЕКТЫ

Abstract

The concept of socialization and the child’s personality development by Judith Rich Harris, a specialist in the field of developmental psychology, is discussed. Her innovative work at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries contributed to the revision of ideas about the role of the environment and heredity in human development. J.R. Harris is best known as the author of the controversial books The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (1998) and No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (2006). She criticized the common view that parents and parenting styles in the family serve as determining factors in the development of children’s personality. The main idea of Judith Harris’s work is that a child’s personality is shaped more by his immediate social environment and heredity than by the deliberate efforts of parents and teachers. She argues that contextual sensitivity underlies human social adaptation. The child’s behavior is specific to the situation in which it was formed, and such behavior is spontaneously restructured when entering a different social environment, taking into account the requirements of the new situation. J.R. Harris argues that the upbringing that children receive in the family has no lasting effects on the personality development, unlike the behaviors that are formed by children outside the home. Children are socialized primarily through interactions with peers, and their personalities are developed through experiences growing up outside the family circle. Developmental psychology in general and socialization research in particular at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries received incentives to revise established perceptions thanks to the successes of biological sciences, behavioral genetics and deciphering the human genome. Observations by linguists, ethnographers, biologists, and anthropologists also encourage modern psychologists to reconsider conventional concepts.