## Metadata - Author: [[Judith Rich Harris and Steven Pinker]] - Full Title: The Nurture Assumption - Category: #books ## Highlights - It is now clear to me that socialization and personality development are two distinct processes. Socialization adapts children to their culture, with the result that they become more similar in behavior to their peers of the same sex. Personality development has the opposite effect: it preserves or widens individual differences. It was an error on my part to conflate these two processes. ([Location 166](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=166)) - “If possible,” counseled a physician on the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association, “the effectiveness of an effort should be determined by someone outside the effort who has nothing to gain by its perpetuation.”3In other words, if you want to know the truth about the emperor’s clothes, don’t ask the tailors. ([Location 370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=370)) - Researchers have found that children’s cuteness or homeliness has a measurable effect on how their parents treat them. A study showed that a mother is, on average, more attentive to her baby if the baby is cute than if the baby is homely. (The cuteness of the babies was rated by independent judges—a panel of undergraduates at the University of Texas.) ([Location 932](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=932)) - Parental love and attention are not distributed evenly; Sulloway got that right. In his book he cited the finding that two-thirds of mothers with two children admitted to researchers that they favored one child over the other.20 What he didn’t mention is that a large majority of these non-impartial mothers said it was their younger child who got more attention and affection. This result was backed up by a later study in which both mothers and fathers were interviewed. About half admitted that they gave more love to one child than the other. Of these parents, 87 percent of the mothers and 85 percent of the fathers favored the younger child. ([Location 1224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1224)) - Among the many family differences that have an impact on a child’s life at home, surely one of the most important is the presence or absence of siblings. The only child leads a very different life from the child with siblings. Her relationship with her parents is likely to be far more intense. She gets all the worry, responsibility, and blame heaped on the oldest child, plus all the attention and affection heaped on the youngest. In the past, when most families had at least two children and deviations from this pattern were usually a sign that something had gone wrong, the only child had a bad reputation. But people are marrying later now and having fewer children. Research done in the past quarter century has turned up no consistent differences between only children and children with one or two siblings. Minor differences do turn up, but sometimes they favor the only child, sometimes the child with siblings. ([Location 1366](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1366)) - Detterman pointed out that undergeneralization may be more adaptive than overgeneralization. It is safer to assume that a new situation has new rules, and that one must determine what the new rules are, than to blithely forge ahead under the assumption that the old rules are still in effect. ([Location 1468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1468)) - Code-switching is sort of like having two separate storage tanks in the mind, each containing what was learned in a particular social context. According to Paul Kolers, a psycholinguist who studied bilingual adults, access to a given tank may require switching to the language used in that context. As an example, he mentioned a colleague of his who had moved from France to the United States at the age of twelve. This man does his arithmetic in French, his calculus in English. ([Location 1633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1633)) - But the motivation to keep the home life from leaking out is stronger than the motivation to keep the outside world from leaking in, and it is especially strong in those who have an inkling that their homes might be abnormal in some way. If their mother drinks, their parents throw things at each other, or their father is an invalid, kids don’t want anyone to know about it. The child of immigrants might avoid inviting friends over to play. The kid whose parents are wealthier than their neighbors may be as anxious to keep it a secret as the kid whose parents are poorer: what they hate is being different from their peers. ([Location 1740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1740)) - Parents belong in the home; when they come out of the home it makes their children nervous. Aside from the embarrassment, it makes it harder for children to know which context they’re in, which rules they’re supposed to follow. They are not aware of this, of course; context almost always affects behavior at a level that is not normally accessible to the conscious mind. It isn’t until adolescence or adulthood that people occasionally become aware of the way their behavior changes in various social contexts. ([Location 1771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1771)) - The psychologists who study adult personality typically assess it by giving their subjects a self-report personality test—a standardized list of self-descriptive statements, each of which the subject must agree or disagree with. In most cases the subjects are college students and the test is administered in a classroom or laboratory at the college. Thus, what the test is measuring is the subject’s college personality, along with any thoughts or emotions associated with that particular classroom or laboratory. If the test is given again months later, to measure consistency across time, it is again given in a classroom or laboratory—usually the same one. The subject may be in a better or worse mood this time, but basically it’s the same personality, with the same associated thoughts and emotions, so the results are reasonably consistent. ([Location 1797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1797)) - If you never go home again, the personality you acquired there may be lost forever. After Cinderella married the prince she never returned to her stepmother’s cottage. Her self-effacing cottage persona was left behind forever, along with her broom and her raggedy clothes. ([Location 1822](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1822)) - the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had a very different message for his eighteenth-century audience: that all children are born good and will remain that way if they are not meddled with too much. Rousseau, by the way, had no children of his own—that is, he reared none of his own. The babies born to his longtime mistress were deposited one by one, with his full knowledge, at the door of a foundling home. They may have been born good but they were not born lucky. ([Location 1961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005JSSAH8&location=1961))