Judith Rich Harris

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The nurture assumption is the idea of how a parent treats a child will determine how that child will turn out to be. Judith Rich Harris says that this is a huge deal with today’s culture in the United States. Anytime a child turns out to be bad or grow up and have problems the first person that everyone blames is the parents of the child. Harris believes that the parents shouldn’t receive the credit whether their child is successful or a failure other than the fact that they provided good or bad genes. Another way to think about it is to think about the people who have influenced yourself the most. The first people that would come to mind are your parents because you’ve had so many life experiences with but if you think critically and work …show more content…

She goes against the main cultural norms saying that parents do not have a long-lasting impact on their children. Instead she points the finger at the peer group as the major force in shaping a personality. The nurture assumption is the idea that how a parent treats a child will determine how that child turns out. This is what natural intuition would make you think and is a big part of culture in the US and many other countries. Harris also developed a group socialization theory that goes into detail about the process in which we learn rules, customs, and language of our culture. She covered small bits of genetics behavior research. Her group socialization theory was put together but did have some flaws that shouldn’t be …show more content…

Identical twins should be more similar than DZ twins if genes are a factor. The two main factors in these studies are shared and non-shared environments. Shared environment factors are non-genetic influences that make family members like one another. Non-shared environment factors include influences that make family members different from one another and may include aspects of the home environment like different treatment from parents and influences outside the home environment like peer influences. The behavior genetics research shows that the shared environment factors relative to genes and shared environment play a small role in developmental outcomes like personality. If we focus on the similarities between parents and offspring, we would attribute this mostly to genes, while differences would be attributed to non-shared environmental

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