No Two Alike

by Judith Rich Harris

  Why are parents so convinced of their importance in their children’s lives? Why do they believe their child’s future success or failure depends on what they do today at home? I’ve thought about this question for a long time and still haven’t settled on a conclusion, but here are my top three hypotheses.

  First, it may result from a set of closely related illusions that social psychologists lump together under the term “self-serving bias.” Most people overestimate their own importance and their ability to control the way things turn out, not just in child-rearing but in everything they do. Also, people are more likely to feel that they were responsible for good outcomes than for poor ones. Thus, if parents think their children are turning out well—and most parents do seem to think so—they are likely to give themselves the credit. Another manifestation of the self-serving bias is a tendency to feel a sense of uniqueness, at least in regard to one’s virtues. So parents whose children are turning out well are likely to attribute that outcome to child-rearing skills or practices they regard as unique and original, though in fact they may be doing exactly what Mr. and Mrs. Jones next door are doing.12

  A second hypothesis is that the parents’ conviction of their own importance in their children’s lives is a concomitant of the package of parenting instincts with which evolution provided us. Hominid babies whose parents took good care of them were more likely to survive than those whose parents were negligent, and the surviving babies inherited the mental mechanisms that impelled their parents to provide that care. The instinct to take good care of our children is built in, but the justification for that care—the feeling of parental importance—needn’t be built in. The conscious mind has a habit of concocting after-the-fact explanations for things we do for reasons the conscious mind knows nothing about.13

  My third hypothesis is that the feeling of parental power is a peculiarity of our culture. The flip side of parental power is parental culpability—the idea that if anything goes wrong with the kid it’s the parents’ fault. It was Sigmund Freud who made that idea part of European and American culture. But Freud did most of his writing in the early part of the twentieth century, and the idea of parental culpability didn’t take off until the late 1940s, after World War II. Two things gave it the nudge it needed: genetic explanations of behavior became unacceptable when people became aware of what the Nazis had done and the reasons they gave for doing it, and palatable versions of Freudian theory worked their way into books of advice to parents. In the United States, the leading promulgator was the advice-giving pediatrician Benjamin Spock.14

  These two cultural influences working together produced a seismic shift in the child-rearing philosophy of ordinary middle-class parents. When I was a little kid, back in the early 1940s, the view was that troublesome kids were “born that way.” I was a troublesome kid and my parents got sympathy, not blame; they felt unlucky rather than guilty. Only a decade later, guilt had become part of the job description of parenting. As the Danish sociologist Lars Dencik observed, “The guilty conscience, which accuses us of not paying sufficient attention to the interests of the child, and which nowadays so plagues parents and other caregivers, is in fact a very new and rather unique feeling in our modern epoch.”15

  In middle-class homes in North America and Western Europe, the modern epoch began shortly after the end of World War II and was accompanied by a new set of cultural myths. Just as people in traditional cultures attribute a child’s faults to something the mother ate or looked at while she was pregnant, or to a hex laid on by a jealous neighbor or a punishment sent by the gods, people in our culture attribute a child’s faults to something the parents did wrong after the child was born.

  New myths can supplant old ones. The fact that almost everyone in a society believes something doesn’t make it true. Was Richard III a villain, as Shakespeare depicted him and as he was believed to be for four hundred years, or was he an honorable man, as detective Alan Grant insisted in The Daughter of Time? I don’t know, but the answer cannot be decided by a popular vote.

  Even people who aren’t parents themselves give their own parents the credit and blame for how they turned out. The classic case is the poet Philip Larkin, who famously griped, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” Though he admitted that he shared most of his faults with his parents, he never entertained the thought that he might have inherited them.16

  Of course, Larkin too was a product of his culture. But there’s more to it than cultural myths. Introspection—conscious thoughts about ourselves—play a role in our theories of why we are the way we are. Freud couldn’t have succeeded as he did if his theory hadn’t struck a chord in those who read or heard about it. Something in what Freud said rang true. I believe it was the picture he painted of a complex mind made up of components that struggle with one another and that sometimes operate below the level of consciousness. The man was none too scrupulous in his use of evidence, and on the whole he did far more harm than good, but he happened to get some things right. Though Freud wasn’t the first to speak of innate drives and unconscious processes, he was the one who brought them to people’s attention.17

  But it wasn’t the unconscious mind that provided most of the support for Freud’s theory. On the contrary, his greatest ally was the conscious mind. In the first chapter of this book I mentioned Robin Dunbar’s study of conversation. Dunbar and his students listened in on people’s conversations and found that two-thirds of their conversation time was spent on “matters of social import. Who is doing what with whom.”18 The people carrying on these conversations weren’t actively engaged in any work-related tasks; if they had been, no doubt more of their talk would have been about the work at hand. Furthermore, people don’t say everything that pops into their heads. But surely what they’re talking about gives us some indication of what’s in their conscious minds at the moment, and what they’re talking about a lot of the time is other people. They’re transmitting and receiving information of the type that is stored in the people-information lexicon, part of the relationship system. If a large share of our conversational material is generated by the relationship system, this implies that the relationship system also takes up a large share of our conscious thoughts and, therefore, of our accessible memories.

  Though Freud talked a lot about the unconscious, his theory is almost entirely about relationships, and the relationship system does most of its work right out in the open. The motives that so engrossed him, sex and aggression, are provided by mechanisms that serve the relationship system and are readily accessible to the conscious mind. The conversation Freud elicited from his subjects (I hesitate to call them his patients, since he didn’t seem to regard them that way himself 19) was all about relationships. It is not surprising that relationships with parents should figure prominently in one’s memories of childhood, or that Mom’s and Dad’s pages in one’s people-information lexicon should be very full.

  In contrast to the relationship system, the socialization system does most of its work underground, at a level not easily accessible to consciousness. We do not know how we got socialized because we weren’t thinking about it when it happened. In fact, the socialization system I have described bears a resemblance to Freud’s superego, and the two serve similar functions. But in attributing the formation of the superego to identification with the same-sex parent, Freud was demonstrably wrong. The idea that the child learns how to behave by identifying with the same-sex parent is one of the few aspects of Freudian theory that generates testable predictions, and research has not supported the predictions. Boys growing up without a father are no less masculine than those in two-parent homes. Children in two-parent homes do not resemble their same-sex parent in degree of masculinity or femininity. In fact, the evidence suggests (according to two developmentalists who looked at a good deal of it) that “a boy resembles other children’s fathers [in behavior] as much as he does his own.”20

  Freud’s notion that young children learn how to behave by identifying with th
eir parents may have been based on what he knew about the children of his neighbors and colleagues in late-nineteenth-century Vienna, as well as on his own memories of childhood. These children were too young to go to school and perhaps had less contact with peers than children do nowadays. Many of them seem to have been firstborns or only children, so they also lacked siblings. Children will imitate whoever is around, and these children had a very limited choice of models. In The Nurture Assumption, I described a child who was reared with a young chimpanzee and who imitated the chimpanzee.21 A child without siblings whose parents have neglected to provide him with a chimpanzee will imitate, for want of an alternative, a grownup. Hence we have the photos in child development textbooks of little boys pretending to shave or little girls pretending to cook. But children soon learn that behaving like grownups doesn’t work very well, even at home. They may pretend to be grownups in their imaginative games, but from an early age children recognize the difference between real life and play-acting. Anyway, the grownups they pretend to be are not their parents: they’re prototypes, generated by the central-tendencies calculator of the socialization system—as much like other children’s parents as their own.

  The third mental organ I have proposed, the status system, has no counterpart in Freudian theory. Freud attributed motives such as striving for status to the sex drive and I strongly disagree, even though access to desirable sexual partners is one of the things that status can buy. 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.

  Like the relationship system, the status system does much of its work at a level that is accessible to the conscious mind. Freud thought he needed to explain why some things go on below the level of consciousness, but modern psychologists and philosophers have turned the question around: Why does anything have to be conscious? That’s the philosophers’ version of the question and I leave it to them. The psychologists’ version is narrower but has the virtue of being at least potentially answerable: Why are some functions carried on right out in the open while others remain underground? For my purposes, the question can be narrowed still more: Given the limited workspace in the conscious mind, why is so much of that valuable space assigned to the relationship system and the status system?

  One reason, I believe, has to do with language. Before we can put anything—a thought, a feeling, a bit of information—into words, it has to be accessible to the conscious mind. If consciousness gives us the ability to communicate in words, then it also makes it possible for us to gossip. Thus, consciousness serves the relationship system by enabling it to collect (and trade with others) information of the sort that is stored in the people-information lexicon. It serves the status system in a similar way. One of the ways we acquire information about ourselves is through verbal communication.

  Both systems make use of the mindreading mechanism; indeed, the status system couldn’t get along without it. This suggests another reason for granting these two systems the gift of consciousness. The evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has hypothesized that consciousness enables us to reflect upon ourselves, and that this is what makes it possible to look into other people’s minds. Humphrey’s point is that we wouldn’t be able to understand what other people are thinking unless we had the ability to introspect on our own mental processes.22

  A final reason has to do with memory—in particular, with the distinction (explained in chapter 8) between explicit and procedural memory. Explicit memories, by definition, are available to the conscious mind; procedural memories generally are not. Memories for specific events are explicit; procedural memories are not about specific events but about things that happen over and over again. An explicit memory captures what was unique about a particular event; a procedural memory captures what a series of events had in common.23 The relationship system requires explicit memory because the relevant experiences aren’t necessarily things that happen over and over again—they may happen only once. The status system makes use of both explicit and procedural memory.

  Explicit memory has other functions as well; it is not used solely for social purposes or for things that happen only once. Factual knowledge (semantic memory) is also accessible to the conscious mind and is therefore explicit. There are mental systems I haven’t talked about in this book; they do other jobs and collect other kinds of information, such as the fact that a certain plant is poisonous or the location of the nearest source of water. That kind of knowledge, too, can be received in the form of verbal messages and profitably shared with other people.

  My solution to the mystery is that three perpetrators are involved: three mental systems that go about their business in different ways. Together, these three can answer the hows, whys, whens, and wheres of personality development. They can explain why children, while they are growing up, become more like their peers in some ways and less like them in other ways, why they are motivated both to conform and to compete, and why they behave differently with different people and in different situations. My three-systems theory accounts for the behavioral genetic findings and for observations made by social psychologists. It is consistent with the increasingly prevalent view, proposed by evolutionary psychologists and supported by neurophysiological data, that the human mind is a toolbox of specialized devices.

  But have I proved it? At the beginning of the book I quoted a famous saying by Sherlock Holmes: “When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” But what if there were other alternatives that Sherlock hadn’t excluded because they hadn’t occurred to him? In science, all one can say is that one’s theory accounts for more of the evidence, or accounts for it in a more intellectually satisfying way, than the other theories currently available.

  An intellectually satisfying theory is one that follows Einstein’s rule: make things as simple as you can, but no simpler. I will be the first to admit that my theory of personality development isn’t simple. The problem is that none of the simpler theories work. I spent half the book showing that none of the simpler theories work.

  Though it’s possible that a new simple theory will suddenly appear on the horizon and turn out to be the winner, at this point it seems unlikely. More likely, I’m afraid, is that my theory will ultimately be beaten out by one that is even more complex. Biological processes have turned out to be fancier and messier than anyone imagined, and the brain is a hodgepodge of biological processes. Both as a theorist and as a writer, I like to make things clear and elegant, but this inevitably means leaving out exceptions and glossing over complications. For example, I spoke of the fusiform face area of the brain as an area that specializes in the recognition of faces, but neuroscientists have found that this area may also be involved in expertise in other kinds of recognition, where the expert’s job is to discriminate among large numbers of similar items, such as postage stamps for stamp collectors or birds for ornithologists.24

  More important, I’ve depicted the three systems as neatly separate and distinguishable, but the truth is unlikely to be that neat. The systems may overlap or share facilities; the borders between them may be hazy rather than sharp. Does the mind really make a distinction between dominating one rival (the relationship system) and being top man on the totem pole in a group of three (the status system)? And is the relationship system really just one system? Some evolutionary psychologists prefer to think that relationships are managed by a bunch of separate modules: one for mat
ing, one for friendships, one for partnerships in reciprocal trade, one for parent-child relationships, and so on. I’ve depicted it as a single system because all these types of relationships rely on recognition and memory of individuals, and because the drive to acquire people-information appears to be much like the drive to learn words: we needn’t have a specific purpose in mind in order to want to acquire the information. Maybe it will come in handy someday for some purpose or other; maybe it won’t. When we meet new people, we generally don’t know whether they will become friends, lovers, trading partners, or what; but that doesn’t prevent us from starting to collect information about them. And if someone who once was a friend becomes a lover, we needn’t start all over from scratch finding out what he or she is like. What we learned about this person when we were friends will still be available to us and will probably still be useful.

  On the other hand, once we do have a particular kind of relationship with a person, we are likely to be more interested in obtaining some kinds of information than others, and we will use the information in different ways. The knowledge that someone is a close relative will be used in one way if we’re thinking about mating, in another way if we’re thinking about sharing. In the table on chapter 10, I assigned the relationship system a single sociometer, which gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down signal depending on whether the relationship currently in the spotlight is going well or poorly. But one sociometer might not be enough: separate gadgets might be needed for the various kinds of relationships. A mating sociometer, designed to tell us whether another person is willing to jump into bed with us, wouldn’t be very useful for judging whether someone trusts us as a trading partner.25