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The Nurture Assumption , Judith Har- ris (1998) argues that children’s development is not somuch determined by parental influences as by the peergroup. On the basis of behavioral genetic evidencepointing to the importance of genetic factors and theunimportance of shared environment, Harris suggeststhat parents are not important in determining individ-ual differences in children’s personality. Instead, it is children’s genes that are responsible both for the waythat parents respond to their children and for chil-dren’s personality characteristics. Genetic factors ex-plain only about half of the variance of personalitydevelopment. The other half is due to environmentalfactors. These environmental factors, however, tend tomake children growing up in the same family differ-ent, rather than alike, and have, therefore, been called“nonshared environment” (Plomin & Bergeman, 1991;Rowe, 1994; Turkheimer & Waldron, 2000). As an alter-native to parental environmental influence, Harris(1995, 1998) proposes that children’s peers are the pri-mary context for the development of individual differ-ences in personality.