Introduction
Judith Rich Harris is an American psychologist with a scholarly career that has become quite exceptional after a century of professionalized and compartmentalized science. Although blessed with a well-developed faculty for rigorous analytical thinking, two mishaps conspired to sidetrack her from the beaten academic path. First, she was dismissed from Harvard’s PhD psychology program in 1960, because she was considered insufficiently capable of original and independent thinking. Second, she was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease in 1977, which confined her to her home and made a career in science even more implausible. Unable to give up on her love for science, she found a way to feed her interest in psychology as an author of textbooks from 1970s up to 1990s. This enabled her to read widely and to familiarize herself with different psychological paradigms, which proved to be of great importance eventually, when she emerged out of the shadows of textbook-authorship with...
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Wesseling, L. (2018). Judith Rich Harris. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2396-1
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