DanP said:
I audited his material. I think you should audit the all set, but the debate on "mum and dead ****ed me up" is in Lecture 13 , "Why Are People Different?: Differences ". It's a great course and a good starting point in any further exploration for example behavioral genetics, human motivation and social psychology.
You could try to find developmental psychology courses as well, but I am not sure if you will find too many on internet, as opposed to intro Psych. Berekely may have a developmental course and one on developmental psychopatology on their podcasts , but I am not sure.
You could also try to audit a course in Social psychology, specially sections dedicated to self and self-awareness, and how social identity is built. Try to find UCLA's Matthew Lieberman social psych course, its excellent and if i recall correctly it does talk about development of self.
Make up your own mind on it. I am not going to tell you that parents do not count at all, what I tell is that their role is way less pronounced than the dogma says.
I checked out the lecture transcript, and really, it's not necessarily supporting Judith Harris' view, just putting it out there as ONE explanation, and a controversial one at that, which it is. A blatant omission in Judith Harris' "theory" is that she rejects out of hand the notion of a feedback loop, because for some reason, she seemed simply uncomfortable with a loop. In everything she describes, there is very much a possibility that there is a cycle of reinforcement between parent and child and not that it is all unidirectional, but she seems to want to force the view that all influence must be in one direction.
She also tends to dismiss other studies with evidence that is addressing a different point, and not directly contradicting the initial study. For example, in talking about birth order, she rejects that the time a first born is raised with the full, undivided attention of new parents is going to be beneficial to the first born child because asking parents later in life which child they favor resulted in them overwhelmingly favoring the youngest child. What's to say that BOTH aren't important? Maybe being favored a bit more later on in life compensates for never being the sole focus of your parents' attention for any length of time?
And, while peers certainly influence kids' behavioral development too, don't "good" parents also influence selection of peers? Mine certainly did. It seems well-recognized that kids do things their peers do (but then where did their peers get that from?), but a strong parental contribution is who they permit you to interact with as peers. I know, at least from my own upbringing, if I made a new friend at school, there was a screening process of some sort through which my parents decided if their parents were suitably responsible and a good influence for me to visit their home, or if my friend had to come to my house to play, or if I was allowed to spend time with them at all.
Again, in all these cases, it's true that it's difficult to separate cause and effect since there is two-directional interaction. But, Judith Harris really seems to want to reject any influence at all simply because it's hard to tease apart cause and effect, and refuses consideration that it could be BOTH cause and effect in a feedback loop of parent-offspring interactions.
So, I don't think Judith Harris' views are widely accepted among developmental psychologists. Just skimming through the articles in the current edition of
Developmental Psychology shows that this is far from a consensus view or closed case.
