eShop USA > Books > No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
List Price: $16.95Our Price: $11.53 You Save: $5.42 (32%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 155.2
EAN: 9780393329711
ISBN: 0393329712
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: June 11, 2007
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
Related Items: Featured Listmania!
Editorial Review:
A groundbreaking theory of personality.The author of the controversial book The Nurture Assumption tackles the biggest mystery in all of psychology: What makes people differ so much in personality and behavior? It can't just be "nature and nurture," because even identical twins who grow up together—same genes, same parents—have different personalities. And if psychologists can't explain why identical twins are different, they also can't explain why each of us differs from everyone else. Why no two people are alike.Harris turns out to be well suited for the role of detective—it isn't easy to pull the wool over her eyes. She rounds up the usual suspects and shows why none of the currently popular explanations for human differences—birth order effects, for example, or interactions between genes and environment—can be the perpetrator she is looking for. None of these theories can solve the mystery of human individuality.The search for clues carries Harris into some fascinating byways of science. The evidence she examines ranges from classic experiments in social psychology to cutting-edge research in neuroscience. She looks at studies of twins, research on autistic children, observations of chimpanzees, birds, and even ants.Her solution is a startlingly original one: the first completely new theory of personality since Freud's. Based on a principle of evolutionary psychology—the idea that the human mind is a toolbox of special-purpose devices—Harris's theory explains how attributes we all have in common can make us different.This is the story of a scientific quest, but it is also the personal story of a courageous and innovative woman who refused to be satisfied with "what everyone knows is true." 12 illustrations.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Too much personal noise
Since I liked her first book "The Nurture Assumption," I thought this one would also be enlightening, and it was somewhat, but it wasn't nearly as good. It seeks to answer the question of why identical twins are different even when they're raised in the same household--and why other siblings and step-siblings differ as they do. About 50% of our behavior is genetic and the rest, she posits, derives from three "mental systems": the relationship system, the socialization system, and the status system. ... Read More
Rating:  - Filling in the gaps.
No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality
Easy to read and understand! Answers some of the questions left open in Stephen Pinker's chapter in "The Blank Slate" on the same subject. Brings together a lot of aspects of cognitive science into a coherent whole!
Rating: - A masterful presentation of how we become who we are
This is an outstanding book on social and developmental psychology based primarily on evolutionary psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience--the new paradigm that's revolutionizing academic psychology. It's engagingly written, authoritative, witty, ingeniously argued, and filled with information and wisdom. Judith Rich Harris is that rare, very rare, individual who is a top academic without a position at a major university, a professor without portfolio, so to speak.
When I first ... Read More
Rating: - No Two Alike
Harris has produced a very satisfying three-legged stool of a theory, giving a stability not achieved by any of the usual two-factor approaches. I will immediately start requiring my students to read it! On the negative side, she spends too much time rehearsing old feuds and wounds in the first half of the book.
Rating: - Another gem from one of our best thinkers
Judith Rich Harris is one of a kind: a brilliant, iconoclastic thinker who has made a huge contribution to social science from her book-filled study, armed only with her own formidable intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge of the literature. Just as we now know that Knopf rejected classic books by Nabokov and Kerouac as unreadable, the Harvard psychology department foolishly encouraged Ms. Harris to leave its Ph.D. program in the 1960s. But as THE NURTURE ASSUMPTION and NO TWO ALIKE show, Harvard's ... Read More
Related Categories:
Recently viewed PC Hardware:
Apple PowerBook G4 (500MHz PowerPC G4 Processor, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB Hard Drive)
|
XPC-SG33G5 S775 G33 MATX
|
Apple PowerBook Laptop 15.2" M9677LL/A (1.67 GHz PowerPC G4, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, SuperDrive)
|
Toshiba Satellite A105-S2201 15.4" Widescreen Notebook PC (Intel Celeron M Processor 420, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD SuperMulti Drive)
|
IBM ThinkPad T41 (23737FU) Laptop (1.6 GHz Pentium M Centrino, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Combo)
|
| |
 |
