No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
by Judith Rich Harris
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Book Summary Information
Author: Judith Rich HarrisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-06-17
ISBN: 0393329712
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Book Reviews of No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
Book Review: A masterful presentation of how we become who we are
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an outstanding book on social and developmental psychology based primarily on evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience--the new paradigm that's revolutionizing academic psychology. It's engagingly written, authoritative, witty, ingeniously argued, and filled with information and wisdom. Judith Rich Harris is that rare, very rare, individual who is a top academic without a position at a major university, a professor without portfolio, so to speak.
When I first picked this up I almost put it down again. The title "No Two Alike" sounds suspiciously like another feel good, shallow celebration of human diversity. Right. We're all wonderful. Thanks, I needed that. Furthermore, I kind of creeped out at the joined-at-the-heads twins that were the subject near the beginning of the book. In fact I stopped reading from the beginning and put the book aside. When I returned to it, I noticed that chapters six through nine were entitled, The Modular Mind, The Relationship System, The Socialization System, and The Status System. That rekindled my interest.
The idea of the modular mind comes from fairly recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology as understood from an evolutionary perspective. I started reading on page 143 where the chapter on the modular mind begins. What I discovered is that Harris' understanding of who we are and how we got that way begins with evidence from genetics and ends with insights from social psychology. She sees the relationship system as the way we learn to form and maintain relationships with others. The infant begins with a relationship with its mother. Harris states that the child's first job is to get the mother to love her. I have seen this in children and they do it mostly by appealing to the mother's instincts. They are small and helpless with relatively big eyes and soft skin, etc., and so appear to the mother as irresistibly cute. Next they try to win the love of the father. Girls instinctively know that if they win the love of their father they are likely to be safe. They work hard at it. Then come the relationships with others.
And then comes the socialization system. Harris makes a distinction between learning to form relationships and socialization. In the former it's one on one. In the latter we don't so much relate to individuals as to the average of all others. We seek to become like the typical person in our group. We support the group and identify with its values and preoccupations.
Finally comes the status system. This is in some sense at loggerheads with the socialization system. Instead of seeking to be like others, what we want is to be like them only a little better or at least a little better at something. Instead of imitating the styles of others we look at them to read how they rate us.
Harris sees these three systems with our genes interacting over time as forming our personalities. She makes it clear that it is our peer groups that we look to for both our identity and our status. She believes that the primary information we receive does not come from our parents. We adjust to and comform to the values, beliefs and mores of the larger society at the peer group level, not to the values, beliefs and mores of our parents, except insofar as their values are similar to those of the larger group. Furthermore, we tend to discount the opinions of our relatives when assessing our status. (They can be biased!) Instead we look to our peers to tell us how we stand. Harris calls this "mindreading," but what we do is not so much read the minds of our peers as read their behavior, especially their behavior toward us, and deduce our status accordingly. If everybody in the group suddenly turns to look at you when the tough question comes up--guess what? They probably think you are the best person to answer it. When it comes to deciding how to choose up teams for basketball, if their eyes turn to Basketball Jones, you can be fairly sure that they think Basketball Jones knows basketball, or at least she knows how to set up teams.
The complex interactions of these systems in addition to the genetic endowment ensures us that everybody is unique, even identical twins. Harris makes a point of showing how identical twins become differentiated over time through feedback from especially the status system. People need to form mental dossiers on everybody they know, and they do so even with twins; and in doing so they see fine distinctions, and then the distinctions grow. Not only that but one twin will, through happenstance or "environmental noise," as Harris terms it, be ever so slightly more assertive or more confident, and that difference, like a leak in a dike, will grow.
In short this is a terrific book, skillfully and even eloquently written, full of information and deep insights into human nature, well documented and argued in a most convincing manner. It is simply one of the best books on psychology that I have read in quite a while.
Here's a quote from Harris that demonstrates her skill and intelligence: "The desire for status begins early and lasts a lifetime. Old people in nursing homes, well past the point when Viagra can do them any good, still care about their status. In my view, status is an end in itself for humans. The fact that it buys access to desirable sexual partners in adulthood is no doubt one of the evolutionary reasons we are endowed with this motive, but evolution's reasons shouldn't be confused with people's motivations. Status also buys access to desirable things to eat and drink, but the drive to gain status isn't a side effect of hunger or thirst. If anything, hunger and thirst are likely to interfere with the quest for status. Sex can too. Ask Bill Clinton." (p. 256)
Summary of No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
A groundbreaking theory of personality.
The author of the controversial book The Nurture Assumption tackles the biggest mystery in all of psychology: What makes people differ so much in personality and behavior? It can't just be "nature and nurture," because even identical twins who grow up together?same genes, same parents?have different personalities. And if psychologists can't explain why identical twins are different, they also can't explain why each of us differs from everyone else. Why no two people are alike.Harris turns out to be well suited for the role of detective?it isn't easy to pull the wool over her eyes. She rounds up the usual suspects and shows why none of the currently popular explanations for human differences?birth order effects, for example, or interactions between genes and environment?can be the perpetrator she is looking for. None of these theories can solve the mystery of human individuality.
The search for clues carries Harris into some fascinating byways of science. The evidence she examines ranges from classic experiments in social psychology to cutting-edge research in neuroscience. She looks at studies of twins, research on autistic children, observations of chimpanzees, birds, and even ants.
Her solution is a startlingly original one: the first completely new theory of personality since Freud's. Based on a principle of evolutionary psychology?the idea that the human mind is a toolbox of special-purpose devices?Harris's theory explains how attributes we all have in common can make us different.
This is the story of a scientific quest, but it is also the personal story of a courageous and innovative woman who refused to be satisfied with "what everyone knows is true."
12 illustrations
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