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Title: The nurture assumption
WonderClub
Item Number: 9780684857077
Number: 1
Product Description: The nurture assumption
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780684857077
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780684857077
Rating: 3.5/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/70/77/9780684857077.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
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$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Jimmy St-germain
reviewed The nurture assumption on February 10, 2012I read this book with great interest. It has been quite influential in the developmental psychology community, and its arguments are widely cited in other work on the subject. The book makes two arguments: 1) The influence of parents on their children is grossly overstated by developmental psychologists. decades of research has largely failed to demonstrate the strength or persistence of "nurture" effects on children over the long-term. 2) Group effects are far more powerful than parental effects.
For the average reader, books like this pose a great challenge. The reader must trust the author to interpret a huge volume of research on the subject. This Ms. Harris does extremely well. I have no doubt that hers is an honest and thorough account. But a more fundamental problem concerns the methods and measures that prevail in the discipline of psychology. Most readers lack the grounding in research to evaluate the validity of the inputs and outcomes in the research cited. This is a real problem. It is not at all clear that psychology has figured out how to measure things that truly matter. I refer you to Jerome Kagan's "Psychology's Ghosts" for a good (and recent) overview of this subject.
But even if we accept that the research cited by the author is actually measuring the right thing--some indicator of personality or wellness--the book is deeply flawed. The essence of my criticism is this: I disagree the premise of her argument. Much of her analysis rests on the assertion that parents NOT affecting their children's behavior should be the null hypothesis. She contends that nurture effects are the invention of modern psychology, and draws on observations of primitive societies and primates to back her up.
The choice of the null hypothesis has huge importance. It is the high ground in science. Alternative hypotheses must knock the null off of its perch. Harris argues that research must demonstrate that parents have significant (non-genetic) effects on their offspring. Yet the notion that parents have an enduring, central effect on their children is ancient. It is found in fairy tales, scripture, poems, etc. across numerous cultures and societies. Jews, Christians, and Muslims share the following ideas: "Train up a child in the way he should go; when he is old, he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6) "Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee." (Exodus 20:12) "Filial piety" is central to Confucian ideals: honor your parents and your ancestors. (Indeed, whenever the author encounters Asian families and children in her book, her argument dissolves into a mass of confusion. This group appears to be the gross exception to her theory, and she really doesn't know how to deal with it.)
She fails to persuade me that the ephemeral influence of parents is a valid null hypothesis. This is important, because instead of simply demonstrating that most research fails to show significant nurture effects, the burden is on her to demonstrate that parents do not have an effect. It seems that the burden of proof is on researchers to demonstrate that parents do not have significant effects on their children. This should be the alternative hypothesis, and the research in question therefore must demonstrate the inefficacy of parenting in relation to human development.
Toward the end of the book, she makes her hypothesis clear:
"Experiences in childhood and adolescent peer groups modify children’s personalities in ways they will carry with them to adulthood. Group socialization theory makes this prediction: that children would develop into the same sort of adults if we left their lives outside the home unchanged—left them in their schools and their neighborhoods—but switched all the parents around."
This scenario is exactly the data that is necessary to reject the null (parental effects matter). And she does not have it. As much as she tries to find discrete examples (separated identical twins, immigrant children, etc.) that pieced together prove her case, she doesn't have the data she needs. You cannot infer her same children-same group-switched parents conclusion from the bits and pieces of natural experiments that she cites. It's like claiming to know what a cookie tastes like by tasting each ingredient separately.
But let's give her the benefit of the doubt, and accept for a moment that her null (no nurture effect) is legitimate. So now we have to demonstrate that nurture effects are significant. The research she cites doesn't do it. This is the crux of her argument. She cites research that demonstrates group effects but not parenting effects.
In research, if you fail to find a significant effect, there are a few explanations:
1) You have correctly specified the outcome AND the independent variables and there is, in fact, no effect
2) You have misspecified the outcome. You are measuring the wrong dependent variable, or you are incorrectly measuring the right one.
3) You have misspecified the independent variables. You are measuring the wrong independent variables, or you are incorrectly measuring the right ones.
4) Your data lacks sufficient variance. There is a significant effect, you have the right variables and you are measuring them correctly, but your experiment/sample is not varying the independent variables enough.
Having read the book, I am struck that the studies the author cites probably suffer from a combination of the final three conditions.
It is never clear to me that there is a consistent measure of the outcome, much less an accurate one. Where in the book does the author clearly explain what the outcomes are? Some measures of personality, apparently. Consider the difficulties there. What's more, the author suggests that personality is largely set by the early twenties. Yet recent research suggests that psychological assumptions regarding the "plasticity" of personality are without basis. Because psychologists have been convinced for so long that development really stops at the end of adolescence, they haven't been measuring development in adults. Some researchers are starting to do so, and they are finding that some fundamental aspects of adult behavior change significantly in adulthood. Think of the phases of your own adult life, and how your views of appropriate behavior may have shifted through them: single life, dating and engagement, marriage, young children, adolescent children, empty nest, and so on. And I would argue that the salience of our own experiences as children and members of families becomes particularly pronounced when we have children of our own. We may not mimic our parents when we are out with our friends, but we are likely to echo their behaviors, beliefs, values, etc when we are raising our own children. As a parent, my approach to parenting is not at all affected by my peers' parenting behaviors. I don't observe theirs. But my mother and father are always "with" me. Kagan's "Psychology's Ghosts" tackles psychology fundamental struggle with the proper specification and measurement of happiness. Ms. Harris is doubtless correct that decades of research on parenting has failed to demonstrate significant effects in the measures of personality/happiness used. That is probably a more powerful statement about psychology as a discipline than about the role of parents in their children's lives.
I also believe that the lack of variance is a real problem in this research. In acknowledging that truly horrendous parents damage their children, the author invokes the example of drug dealing parents example, and then dismisses as an outlier. Why? Truly bad parents harm their kids. And there is a fair amount of truly bad parenting out there. Yet I think modern societies have developed remarkably homogenized approaches to parenting, and that this has resulted in a significant reduction in the variance of the fundamentally important aspects of parenting. The nurture assumption is powerful and it has attenuated the variance in what matters. Research still see some variance, but not enough to create an effect. Consider the steering wheel on a car: most have some "play" around center. Wiggle the wheel left or right and it has no effect on direction of travel. If you don't have sufficient variance in the amount of movement (or a very small number of cases where the wiggle is sufficient to actually steer the car off of center), you will fail to reject the null that the steering wheel has no effect. And you will be wrong.
Where do we see real variance? I was raised Mormon. This was entirely the consequence of my mother's choices, and it has had a profound effect on my life and my identity. Members of religious minorities--Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Muslims in Christian nations, etc.--are likely to exhibit stronger nurture effects because the variance is there, relative to the rest of the population. Over the course of your life, you will find yourself in situations in which certain aspects of your identity are highly salient, while others fade. Harris contends that your identity as a son or daughter becomes less and less salient as your life progresses. But there are ways in which your parents may raise you to understand your identity as a son and daughter as something that is inextricably linked with your identity in other contexts--as a citizen, as an adherent of a religion, as a parent to your own children, etc.
In any case, the book as fascinating and very thought provoking, but in my opinion it suffers from the classic problem of over-correction. She overstates her case and misdirects her criticism. If someone came and told me that thirty years of research had failed to demonstrate that rainy weather makes you wetter than dry weather, I wouldn't hyothesize that it was, in fact, the carrying of umbrellas that makes you wet. I would ask how we are measuring wetness.
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