A new wave of studies undermines the idea that first-born children grow up to be different from later-born children.
Firstborn children, on average, have an IQ a point or two above their younger siblings, studies have found. By Ben Guarino Ben Guarino Reporter covering the practice and culture of science Email Bio Follow March 14 at 5:40 PM Birth order, according to conventional wisdom, molds personality: Firstborn children, secure with their place in the family and expected to be the mature ones, grow up to be intellectual, responsible and conformist.
The latest study had three prongs: biographical data of explorers and revolutionaries; a survey of 11,000 German households; and an elaborate assessment, called the Basel-Berlin Risk Study, which measured risky behavior of 1,500 people through interviews and experiments. Schmukle and his colleagues, in a study published in 2015, assessed birth order for about 20,000 people in the United States, Germany and Great Britain. The team found that birth order did not alter any of five broad personality traits. Those traits, what psychologists call the “Big Five,” were openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
But before all you firstborns lord your enhanced brains over your siblings, beware: The typical intelligence bonus from birth order is so small that “at an individual level it’ll never make a difference in your life,” Damian said. The late researcher Judith Rich Harris, who did not support theories of birth order, argued that randomness explained such observations. “Chance is probably the reason why a larger-than-expected proportion of a sample of stripteasers, and a larger-than-expected proportion of the scientists who founded SETI , were firstborns,” she wrote.
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