Judith Rich Harris

Judith Rich Harris (1938 to 2018) was an American psychology researcher and the author of The Nurture Assumption, a 1998 book arguing that parents are not the most important factor in child development. Born in Brooklyn and raised largely in Tucson, Arizona, she graduated from Brandeis University in 1959 and was dismissed from the Harvard doctoral program in psychology in 1960 because the originality and independence of her work did not meet its standards, leaving with a master's degree. In the late 1970s she built a mathematical model of visual information processing, then wrote developmental psychology textbooks. In 1994 she proposed a theory of child development centered on the peer group rather than the family, and her 1995 Psychological Review article won the American Psychological Association's George A. Miller Award.