No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (ISBN 0393059480)

Another gem from one of our best thinkers:
Judith Rich Harris is one of a kind: a brilliant, iconoclastic thinker who has made a huge contribution to social science from her book-filled study, armed only with her own formidable intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge of the literature. Just as we now know that Knopf rejected classic books by Nabokov and Kerouac as unreadable, the Harvard psychology department foolishly encouraged Ms. Harris to leave its Ph.D. program in the 1960s. But as THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION and NO TWO ALIKE show, Harvard's loss is our gain: working outside the academy has freed Ms. Harris to view the intellectual landscape from 35,000 feet, and to see things that no one on the ground was able to recognize. I believe that people looking back on our era will see THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION as one of the most important works of social science of this era. NO TWO ALIKE is a worthy successor, taking us into the mystery of human personality and offering a testable hypothesis about what makes us the way we are. Other reviewers have ably summarized the book, and I will not do that here. Instead, I simply urge anyone interested in human beings to read both of Ms. Harris' wonderful books.

Too much personal noise:
Since I liked her first book "The Nurture Assumption," I thought this one would also be enlightening, and it was somewhat, but it wasn't nearly as good. It seeks to answer the question of why identical twins are different even when they're raised in the same household--and why other siblings and step-siblings differ as they do. About 50% of our behavior is genetic and the rest, she posits, derives from three "mental systems": the relationship system, the socialization system, and the status system. These involve interaction between the individual and his (although she usually uses "her") peer group, building on her theories from "The Nurture Assumption." She points out that even identical twins are born with slight differences, and can change further with things like illness, accidents, or just noise, the random "zigs and zags" that happen to people; and that these lead to different experiences with others and different developments in the three systems. The book is intermittently interesting and Harris writes well and entertainingly. But much too much time is spent knocking down other people's theories such as the importance of birth order, parenting fads, and so on. Harris spends an inordinate amount of energy lambasting certain other researchers, or the academy of which she isn't a part, since she was kicked out of Harvard. On the other hand, she invokes Steven Pinker's name quite often, presumably to claim respectability via her acquaintance with a famous person in the scientific community. (*He* thinks I know what I'm talking about.) I could have done without the axe-grinding, and I was annoyed by her frequent and gratuitous mention of her own poor health and inability to get around outside. Why does she need to remind the reader over and over that she isn't well and that she needs other, more mobile people to help her do her research? Is it to make us overlook any literary or scientific shortcomings, or does she just need sympathy? In summary, I think the book does a pretty good job of advancing an interesting premise, but would have been much better--and shorter-- without the personal distractions.

A masterful presentation of how we become who we are:
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)

No Two Alike:
Harris has produced a very satisfying three-legged stool of a theory, giving a stability not achieved by any of the usual two-factor approaches. I will immediately start requiring my students to read it! On the negative side, she spends too much time rehearsing old feuds and wounds in the first half of the book.

Filling in the gaps.:
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality Easy to read and understand! Answers some of the questions left open in Stephen Pinker's chapter in "The Blank Slate" on the same subject. Brings together a lot of aspects of cognitive science into a coherent whole!