Judith Rich Harris (1938–2019).

Abstract

Presents an obituary of Judith Rich Harris (1938-2019). Judith Rich was born in Brooklyn on February 10, 1938, the daughter of Sam and Fran Lichtman Rich. After a freshman year at the University of Arizona, she earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at Brandeis in 1959. She earned a master's degree from Harvard in 1961 and later that year married her fellow graduate student Charles Harris, who became a researcher in visual perception at AT&T Bell Labs. From the 1960s through the 1980s, she published experimental papers in perception and visual search, including one with S. S. Stevens, a pioneer in modern psychophysics, and another with John A. Swets, who first adapted signal detection theory to psychology. She gave birth to one daughter, Nomi Harris, and adopted another, Elaine Valk. Harris expanded her insight into a radical new theory of socialization-that children's personalities are shaped by genes and peers, not parents-which she laid out in a 1995 article in Psychological Review ("Where Is the Child's Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development") and her 1998 bestseller, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).