Education
Thursday, 01 April 2010 05:04
Written by Matt Kuykendall

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Pondering the effect of birth rank on personality development

Explaining children’s personality attributes in terms of their birth order is simply attempting to make sense of what is so often unintelligible. It stands to reason that the last-born should have a more outgoing personality and turn into the family clown in order to get a larger share of their parents’ affection. It should also hold true that the first born would be the most academic, as they have all the attention paid to them during their early development, as well as needing to mature sooner so that they can take care of their younger siblings.

Logical, right? Perhaps, but the science doesn’t hold up. The thing is that while a lot of research has been done and numerous books written on the subject of birth order and its affect on personality development, the methodology has often been found to be unreliable.

A significant problem with the majority of research is that there’s no way to separate birth order effects from socioeconomic effects. For example, people with more education and more money tend to have fewer children. So a disproportionate number of only-child subjects studied came from high-income two-parent homes. Whereas studies conducted on middle children tended to be those that fell lower down the socioeconomic spectrum because they came from families with three or more children. What is more, family size is often tied to culture, therefore cultural differences could account for personality differences as well. Due to research methodology problems such as these, some leading scientists, including Steven Pinker of Harvard University, have dismissed birth order as irrelevant.

Meanwhile, fellow alumni Josh Hartshorne recently published a paper elucidating birth order’s affects on IQ. Hartshorne found that: “The more older siblings one has, the lower one’s IQ.” Other studies published show that birth order affects whom we choose as friends and spouses. First-born people tend to associate with other first-born people, and so on.

However, while findings such as these may validate some of our intuition regarding birth order, it’s important to separate the amateur pop-psychology from the actual science and avoid projecting preconceptions of personality based on birth order onto our kids.

Matt Kuykendall teaches Social Studies at Shanghai American School’s Puxi Campus

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