Month: October 2006

Judith Rich Harris has an engaging writing style and covers a wide range of research in her book. There are a number of references to her earlier book, The Nurture Assumption.

The Economist wrote about Harris first book in a 1998 review: Parents, she argues, have no important long-term effects on the development of the personality of their children. Far more important are their playground friends and neighbourhood companions. Ms Harris takes to bits the assumption which has dominated developmental psychology for almost half a century. Freud was wrong; Philip Larkin was wrong. It is not your mum and dad who fuck you up, but the other kids on the block and those fellow brats in the classroomMum and dad surely cannot be ditched completely. Young adults may, as Ms Harris argues, be keen to appear like their contemporaries. But even in those early years, parents have the power to open doors: they may initially choose the peers with whom their young associate, and pick that influential neighbourhood. Moreover, most people suspect that they come to resemble their parents more in middle age, and that peoples child-rearing habits may be formed partly by what their parents did. So the balance of influences is probably complicated, as most parents already suspected without being able to demonstrate it scientifically. Even if it turns out that the genes they pass on and the friends their children play with matter as much as affection, discipline and good example, parents are not completely off the hook.

William Saletan reviewed No Two Alike for The New York Times reviewed this March:

The mystery is why people even identical twins who grow up in the same home with the same genes end up with different personalities. The detective is Harris herself, a crotchety amateur, housebound because of an illness, who takes on the academic establishment armed only with a sharp mind and an Internet connection. Harris the author scrupulously follows clues; Harris the protagonist drives the story forward through force of character, arriving at a theory of personality that could be said to describe herself.

Your socialization system figures out how to conform to your group. Your relationship system figures out how to get along with each person. Your status system figures out how to compete. It monitors people’s reactions, gathering information about how smart, pretty, weak or talented they think you are. It looks for virtues, activities and occupations at which you’re most likely to best your peers. It notices tiny differences between the way people regard you and the way they regard others in your peer group, or even your twin. By choosing pursuits based on these differences, it magnifies them. It drives you to be different.

This is the paradox behind the book’s subtitle. Human nature causes human individuality; the mental systems that we share are also the ones that distinguish us. But if these three systems are, as Harris concludes, the “perpetrators” of individuality as we know it, the mystery of how we got here gives way to the mystery of where we’re going. The perpetrators remain at large. The evolutionary forces that gave us distinctive personalities don’t end here. Human nature isn’t finished with human individuality, or with itself.

No Two Alike is a fascinating book because it is a story about us and the people around us. Harris wonderful story-telling brings alive what could otherwise have been a dull and dreary scientific paper.

Tomorrow: The War of the World

Sitting down to read a good book is a delight that has no parallel. As one starts reading, one gets immersed in the world that has been crafted by the author. Be it fiction or non-fiction, as a reader, I like to forget about the environs and let the author take over the mind. Books have an immersiveness that watching TV or reading an article on the Internet or in a newspaper can never have. It is like traveling on a long flight. One can easily lose sense of time with no distractions to split attention. So, for the next few weeks, I will pick a few more good books. As the year draws to a close and some of us take vacations, maybe one or more of these books can make a good companion.

No Two Alike was a book recommended by Chetan Parikh at one of our recent Book Club meetings. Written by Judith Rich Harris, it delves into, as the byline suggests, human nature and human individuality. It is about our personality what makes us different. Harris had earlier written The Nurture Assumption, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. As Chetan pointed out in his review during our meeting, it is written in a somewhat of a detective style as a mystery book. Harris considers herself an academic investigator. She suffers from systemic schlerosis and lupus, two autoimmune diseases. Yet, she has conquered her physical limitations to put together a magical journey through the theories beyond personality and behaviour.

Here is how Publishers Weekly [via Amazon.com] summarises the book:

Why do identical twins who grow up together differ in personality? Harris attempts to solve that mystery. Her initial thesis in The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do is replaced here with a stronger, more detailed one based on evolutionary psychology. Reading this book is akin to working your way through a mystery novelcomplete with periodic references to Sherlock Holmes. And Harris has a knack for interspersing scientific and research-laden text with personal anecdotes. Initially, she refutes five red herring theories of personality differences, including differences in environment and gene-environment interactions. Eventually, Harris presents her own theory, starting from modular notions of the brain (as Steven Pinker puts it, “the mind is not a single organ but a system of organs”). Harris offers a three-systems theory of personality: there’s the relationship system, the socialization system and the status system. And while she admits her theory of personality isn’t simple, it is thought provoking. Harris ties up the loose ends of the new theory, showing how the development of the three systems creates personality.

This is what Scientific American wrote [via Amzon.com]:

Where does adult personality come from? Why are we all different? These are the questions energizing Judith Rich Harriss new book.

Harris then develops a complex scheme based on “the modular mind,” a framework set forth by Harvard University evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker and others. (Harris herself has no doctorate and is housebound by systemic sclerosis and lupus, two autoimmune disorders.) She describes three modulesthe relationship system, the socialization system and the status systemand explains how each contributes its part to making us who we are. The relationship system starts in the cradle as infants study and learn the faces and voices of the people around them, collecting information that helps form personality. The socialization system adapts people to their culture. The status system takes all the information collected during childhood and adolescence and shapes and modifies our personalities in accord with our environments.

Harriss last chapter lays out her theory in tabular form, explaining how each module interacts with the others to produce our distinct personalities. It is lavishly footnoted, like the rest of the book, shoring up her strategy of pointing out the failings of other models and then proposing her own. Her goal, she writes, is to explain the variations in personality that cannot be attributed to variations in peoples genes.

Tomorrow: No Two Alike (continued)