Harré was born in Āpiti, in northern Manawatu, near Palmerston North, New Zealand,[5] but held British citizenship.

[3] He also played an important part in the discursive turn in social psychology, a field he came to in the middle of his career.

From 2009 until 2011 he served as Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics in conjunction with his US post.

He was an important early influence on the philosophical movement critical realism, publishing The Principles of Scientific Thinking in 1970 and Causal Powers with E. H. Madden in 1975.

Another one of Harré's distinctive contributions was to the understanding of the social self in microsociology, which he called "ethogenics:" this method attempts to understand the systems of belief or means by which individuals can attach significance to their actions and form their identities, in addition to the structure of rules and cultural resources that underlie these actions.