Judith Rich Harris

Judith Rich Harris was born on 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 reasonably comfortably. 

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 four grandchildren, born in 1996, 1999, 2001, and 2004. Before her children were born, Harris worked as a teaching assistant in psychology at MIT (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 a chronic autoimmune disorder called mixed connective tissue disease - an "overlap" combination of lupus and systemic sclerosis. This disorder can affect virtually any organ in the body. One of its more serious complications is a heart-lung condition known as pulmonary arterial hypertension. Harris was diagnosed with this condition in 2002.

While bedridden 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 was 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 Harris had begun work on a new development textbook, without a co-author this time, when she had an idea that led her to formulate a new theory of child development. She abandoned the textbook and instead wrote an article for the Psychological Review. Work on The Nurture Assumption began in 1995; the book was published three years later (Free Press, 1998). But the theory continued to evolve. The final version was presented in No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (Norton, 2006).

Harris is a member of the Association for Psychological Science and Phi Beta Kappa. In 1998 she received the George A. Miller Award from 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. In 2007 she received the David Horrobin Prize for Medical Theory for her article "Parental selection: a third selection process in the evolution of human hairlessness and skin color" (Medical Hypotheses, 2006).