What is the most important psychological experiment not done? This is the question that the British Psychological Society has just asked. Among the experts who respond is the psychologist Judith Rich Harris , who proposes the article that she published in 1995 with a challenging idea: Parents do not have a long-term effect on the personality of their children . What really weighs, argued the psychologist, are the genes that parents pass on to their children and the experiences that these children live outside the home, within their peers .
Harris is convinced that "children would become the same type of adults if we left them in their homes, in their schools, in their neighborhood and in their cultural and subcultural groups, but eliminating all the parents around them." His proposal is based on the multiple evidences derived from different scientific studies in animals and humans. But of course, for practical as well as ethical reasons, proving it with a single grand, conclusive experiment is absolutely impossible. "It's a thought experiment, " says Harris.
