Stuff You Should KnowThis is a very special episode, the first one we've ever fully recorded a second time and decided to release. Why? Because it's good and a little different and we thought you'd enjoy this unheard of double dose. So enjoy!
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Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast again, right Chuck.
That's right, everybody. This was a very strange case, very rare in which we actually recorded an entire episode again that we had already recorded. It was my fault for picking it, but to be fair, nobody else noticed either.
Nope, not at all.
But we decided to release this anyway because we listened to the episodes and we thought it was kind of fun and it might be kind of like a live in Laura is a bit of a stuff you should know easter egg right.
Yeah, exactly, And we really wish we could say it was unique rather than just rare. But this is the second time we've done this. See our Black Holes episodes that's right. So here we go again, everybody with the Birth Order, Episode round two. We hope you like it.
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry He's here. And you put the three of us together, you got pretty good zip ship going zipship?
Is that a word?
Oh, he didn't read that one thing I sent you.
I did, but I didn't pick out that word.
Yes, sibship it is the total siblings in a family.
I love that, isn't that neat? Yeah?
And you can have high sib ships That means your parents got it on a bunch of times without any protection. The second is the low sib ship, which means your parents were maybe be a little cold to one another. And then the third one the midsig sib ship, which I just made up, but I like.
Threes or low means they they got it on a lot, but you know, used protection.
Yeah, Or they're highly intelligent don't want to ruin the planet with extra people. It's another possible interpretation.
I'm sure you won't hear about that one at all.
No, definitely not. It's not me. I'm talking about the people who are into that kind of thinking other people. I can't remember there's a society for that, and I cannot oh the something first, it's like society for human extinction. They're like, we don't want to kill anybody alive, but we just want to stop reproducing because we're ruining the planet. I can't remember the name of them.
I wonder if it's a named as an acronym that just spells.
Ugh it spells die die die. Oh goodness, Well, Chuck, I'm excited about this one. This is a good pick from you, and it was a great assist from our friend Dave Ruse. And we're talking about birth order, and it's one of those things that like everybody knows birth order. I mean, it was even on the Brady bunch, like jan was clearly the middle child, yeah, the middle daughter at least, and really kind of bore that chip on her shoulder. Little Bobby Brady, he was the youngest, and he was often neglected as a result. He had to kind of make his own way and find out that he was really into pork shops and apple shawsh and so on and so forth right. So everybody knows about birth order. But it turns out I didn't realize this. It's had a long history of being presented scientifically and then refuted scientifically, and then we'll come back again, and then it's gone again, and then it's going to come back at you one more time. Kind of like that.
Yeah, so we're going to go over those ups and downs. I'm sure we'll toss in our own opinions here and there that have no basis in sciences. Sure, because I have a as everyone knows, I'm the youngest I know. I have an older brother that's three years older. Yep, Scott. We've talked about a lot, so great, he's the best. And I have a sister that is six years older. Huh. She is the eldest. My sister Michelle, she's also great, yep. And so it's like, you know, three years apart, three years apart, nothing. Because I think some of this stuff can be sort of taken with a grain of salt, Like if you have, you know, the surprise baby that's you know, fourteen years younger than anyone else in your family, things might you know, be different. And then some people say it makes no difference at all about your eventual personality. But I guess to recap we should just go up over how it typically breaks down, which is, if you're the first born, then people will say, Oh, you're probably gonna be bossier. You're probably gonna be an overachiever, maybe a perfectionist, maybe a little neurotic. If you're the middle child or the second born, you're probably gonna be a peacemaker and a people pleaser. And then if you're the baby of the family, then you're just a little spoiled brat, but you're probably gonna be adventurous because you were left to your own devices and you answer to nobody, so you just go off and join the Peace Corps or something.
Sure, then there's also only children, which are kind of their own thing.
But they, yeah, we should do a whole thing on onlies.
I think sure, they very much resemble of the other ones. They much more resemble the firstborn child. Yeah, but a weirder version of a firstborn. So the thing is is, like, all of this sounds totally true and obvious, but it just is not fully born out in the research. It's kind of Dave compares it to a horoscope where you can kind of see yourself or your siblings, and you know, any one of these things. It just kind of makes sense. And we have this selection bias and confirmation bias where we just pick out the stuff that agrees with us, and we ignore the points about say a middle child or a a firstborn child that don't quite fit. We just kind of discard that stuff. And because all of us have some form of family, typically we all have like anecdotal experience with that. And even if you don't have a family, you're probably a friend of somebody who has a family, so you've observed it yourself. So that means that it's just supported that much more through your own experience, which means it's been really hard to shake.
That's right. And that horoscope thing, not to say Dave is not a free thinker, but a lot of people compare it to horoscopes. As it turns out.
Yeah, and another thing, you can call it his pop psychology for sure.
Yeah. So we should go back to the beginning, I guess, which is to say the nineteenth century. As far as the science on birth order goes to eighteen seventy four with someone named that we've talked about a few times on the show Francis Galton. I know that we talked about Galton on episodes where he talked about eugenics, but I'm sure other things have come up as well.
Yeah, he was a polymath, but he was well known for eugenics, genetics. He came up with fingerprinting catalogs like he did all sorts.
Of stuff, that's right. So he was the half cousin of Charles Darwin, and he had a book called English Men of Science. Kind of sounds like Real Men of Genius.
I was going to say it was adapted into a series of bud like commercials later.
Yeah, that's what it seems like. Colon of course their Nature and Nurture in which he he basically was kind of keen to investigate the origin of genius. So what better place to go than to study the gentlemen of the Royal Society, Royal Society of London at the oldest scientific academy in the world. And he got ninety nine guys. It's very strange that he didn't get one hundred, but he didn't get one hundred, and he did a lot of research and got a lot of data on these gentlemen, including birth order stuff.
Yeah, but also mother's hair color. He measured their heads. He really went to town on these ninety nine englishmen of science. And what he found out when he kind of crunched all the data was that sixty one of the ninety nine members that he profiled of the Royal Society were among the oldest in their family. They were either only children, only sons I should say they were only or they were eldest sons, or if they were middle born, they were toward the top of the middle born, the earlier side of the middle born cohort. That's right, And if there was no effect on birth order and genius, then it should have been basically forty five and a half forty five and a half, right, and spare a thought for those poor half people.
That's right. What about the other ten percent? Though?
I think that's uh, that's jerry Okay, So wait wait, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. So no, no, yeah, forty did I say forty nine and a half or forty five.
And a half? Well what do you think?
Let me rephrase that and say forty nine and a half.
Okay, Okay, I got you, because you came up with ninety one I did, and yeah, so I got it wrong too. I said, what about the ten people? It was really nine people?
Yeah, plus you said ten percent. So this whole thing was screwed up, right, just royally all right.
So he concluded based on this, and this is a quote that I would I don't know if you take requests, but I would love for you to read this in the voice of Smigel.
Okay, let's see. Do you remember I think I do so.
I like to think Snegel lives in you in some way a little bit.
Okay, so we said that, oh man, elder sons have on the whole decided advantages of nurture over the younger ones. They're treated more as companions by their parents and have earlier responsibility, both of which would develop independence of character and in less well to new families. The oldest child has the advantage of better nourishment in his infancy compared to the later board siblings.
Pretty close. I feel like that was Smiegel's brother, Spiegel Spiegel not bad though.
So how do you ever remember what Snigel sounds like?
I listened to that every night. Okay, this might go to bed music.
That makes sense.
So if you were too uh, disadvantaged in being thrown off by Josh's hilarious reading. Just a quick recap basically is, if you're the oldest, then you have an advantage because you're like your parents' buddy. You got a lot more responsibility, so you're gonna be more independent.
Uh.
And then if you're a family that's maybe doesn't have as much money, then if you're the oldest and you're gonna you're gonna get the chicken on the table and not be fighting for that chicken like your little brothers and sisters will.
Be, especially in infancy because you were the only one, so you got all the baby food.
Yeah, this doesn't sound I mean, I know a lot of this poo poos the science, but this doesn't sound wildly unreasonable to me as a you know.
No, it's echoed still today in our ideas of birth order and explaining it. Yeah. So that was Francis Galton. We'll leave him and I think probably until I guess about the Actually, not that far after I think he was speaking. He wrote in what the last quarter of the nineteenth century, right, So, I mean just less than fifty years later, a guy named Alfred Adler, who was a psychologist kind of picked that up and ran with it, not just entirely birth order, but birth order was a part of his larger theory called Adlerian psychology or individual psychology. And there were basically three founders of psychotherapy as we know it today. There was Adler, Freud and Jung. And Freud and Jung's ideas have been largely dismissed. Alfred Adler's ideas are basically the premise for how we approach psychology today.
Yeah, and he's a he's an interesting guy. He was a colleague of Freud, and I think through history it seems obvious that a lot of people have kind of said like he was an acolyte or Freud was his mentor, and he went through great pains over the years to say he called me first, Like he would go to reporters and say, look, here's a telegram where Freud got in touch with me and wanted to talk to me.
Oh he was like that, huh.
Well, I just think he had a little bit of a sort of maybe younger sibling syndrome, and that will you know, you'll see that kind of plays out a little bit in his own sibling dynamic. Yeah, his research.
His older brother was named Sigmund two, so I just been freudiant he might have been.
Yeah, they were together, he and Freud for about nine years studying, but then when they split apart, and some people say that it had a lot to do with this sibling dynamic and birth order thing. I think it was more complicated than that, definitely, But they never talked again after that. No, they were done.
Yeah, but Adler's ideas went on. It's definitely worth looking into. He basically says that the whole basis of our individual psychology comes out of our social interactions. We learn how to approach life in the world through our interactions early on with our family. That's he called that our lifestyle. There's a web of interactions between parents and kids and also among siblings he called the family constellation. And then he also said that like, basically the point of life was to be a good, contributing member of a society that is working toward positivity and equality. He was way ahead of his time, because this guy was writing one hundred years ago and now we're just starting to adopt his philosophies. Is like not just valid, Like that's the point of individual psychology.
Yeah, he has a good quote too, and again this seems very reasonable to me when he says, it is a common fallacy to imagine that children of the same family are formed in the same environment. Of course, there's much which is the same for all in the same home, but the psychic situation of each child is individual and differs from that of others because of the order of their succession.
Yeah.
So he's basically saying something that like you said, a lot of people hang their hat on, which is like, hey, just because you grew up in the same house doesn't mean you grew up in the same house. You know what I mean.
Exactly, And he gave an example of that that kind of really figured into his theory about birth order, which was to him another big driver personality that came out of the early experience in the family is that especially older and middle children, or actually I guess older and middle children only went through the trauma of being dethroned. They were, you know, at one point, if you were the firstborn, the only one, and then all of a sudden another one comes along and you're not the shining star of your parents' universe any longer. You have to share that with somebody, and he identified that as a trauma and that that alone would significantly contribute to a child's personality, and that was based on birth order.
All right, boy, that's a great setup, I think. So let's take a break. Yes, yes, Smiel, what do you think? Yes, perfect, and we're going to come back and break down his thoughts on this whole dethroning of what that meant right after this shot shot. All right, So this isn't that much different as far as what birth order means, but it's a little more specific to his own findings and thoughts on the matter. So, if you're oldest, like you said, you're dethroned once there's a sibling below you, and when that happens, there's a chance you might become a problem because you're trying to get that attention again, you might act out. You will likely feel responsible for your younger siblings as if you're a parent, that can make you pretty neurotic. So that checks that box, and you really may act as a parent. You may kind of help raise the kids, especially back then when the parents are away or the parents are busy. You might be that parental authority in a lot of cases. So you may have a positive view of authority, and because of all of this stuff, you're probably gonna be pretty hard working, and that perfectionist thing comes in pretty conscientious.
Yes, So that's the oldest, right, that's right next to second born. If there's two, there's just two kids, this applies to them. They are constantly keeping up or trying to compete with the older sibling. So life is a little bit exhausting. And this is something that Adler himself went through with his older brother Sigmund he as he kind of identified the older sibling then having more of an influence in some cases than the actual parents do on the child's development. Which makes a lot of sense too, because that older child is being a mini parent to the second child. Right If they if the kids finding like they're just constantly are being beat by the by the older sibling, who doesn't even seem to be aware that they're in a competition, they're still winning, they might just go off in a totally different direction and whatever they've identified the older sibling to be, like Alex P. Keaton young Republican type, they're going to go the exact opposite way and start following the grateful.
Dead like Tinay others did exactly.
Man that name, it doesn't matter Tena others. It's the ultimate name. It was. There's Mallory, Alex and.
Others.
Yeah, if they didn't use Tenay others, I think that was a big miss that the writers walk.
Past, I know, and that should They should only have called her by teen the others, not Peter right exactly.
And then like in the credits, it says tiny others as Tina others.
Yeah, as herself. So we mentioned earlier I think I did about Adler's own situation at home, and it turns out, beyond Freud, he had an actual older brother, like you said, whose name was Sigmund, and he sort of had issues with it. He always was trying to live up to this older brother. Sigmund right complained about it a lot. It seemed like I think there was a biographer when he was a little bit older where he said, my eldest brother, he was always ahead of me. He's still ahead of me.
Which is true. He's never going to catch up to his eldest brother, at least in birth order.
Well, that's right.
He also had two younger brothers. One adored Adler kind of bucked the trend. The other one felt competitive with Adler, so he was in the position that Adler was with Sigmund. Yeah, the middle child. So say you're having your parents are just hitting it fast and loose, and they're having more and more children. The middle children are going to have their own kind of baggage to carry around. They're frequently they frequently feel forgotten, ignored, neglected, jam bradyish. They may be. They may decide that life is extraordinarily unfair, that they're invisible, and that might really make them neurotic in their own way. And then this really makes a lot of sense to me too. They may find that family constellation that Adler said was so important in your development and in your youth elsewhere outside of the family, they're the kid that goes off and is like, yeah, whatever, you guys have your fun little you know, family barbecue. I'm going to go hang out at my friend's house instead. I like their family more.
Yeah, which is interesting because I think that flies in the face a little bit of the typical middle child thing of being a people pleaser and a uni Uh.
Yeah, that's funny because I think of the younger child as a people pleaser.
Oh really, because that's usually the middle child thing.
This is the thing, this is where it exactly fall apart.
Exactly. Well, because also in my family, like you know, my sister, she did fine in school, I did fine in school, but my brother was like right in the middle, and he was the he's the really smart guy. Sure, yeah, so he set the bar as number two. But I also felt like I never felt like I had to live up to that.
Oh that's good, that's healthy and lucky.
Lucky because I didn't strive to. I wasn't like, no, I can't be as smart as Scott, so I'll just do my own thing. I just didn't really think about it. And my parents, well I was about to say they didn't put that kind of pressure on me, but they just there was not a lot of attension on me by the time I came around.
Oh yeah, you was your own thing, right, yeah, exactly.
So well, here we are then, at the youngest, I'm talking about myself pampered and spoiled, which I was not, because less is expected. Like we mentioned earlier, you're probably going to be a little more adventurous. I definitely was more adventurous and as sort of the black cheap in my family, but I don't think it was because less it's expected of me. And then, you know, Adler at the end talks about how the successful men of our time and I think of all times oftentimes were the youngest, and he mentions like people in the Bible, and he even mentions, this is where he lose me a little bit. I mentioned fairy tales and I'm like, so the people in these made up stories, the youngest were more successful. So that means something to science.
Right, Yeah, that's where I actually wrote careful Adler after that, because it's he got you know, he had some really great theories. And then one of the big problems of early twentieth century psychologists is they just look out in places that didn't really apply and use them as proof. And that's a good example of that, because his theories are very sound and they make a lot of sense. They're well thought out. It's just you don't run out to the Bible to your point. It doesn't that's not how science works typically.
Yeah, look at King David exactly.
And then we're at only Children, which okay, we'll do a whole episode on them, but they have they have the advantage of being the sole recipient of their parents' attention and focus and love and adoration, just like a first board child. But they never go through the trauma of being dethroned, so they are basically little kings and queens who.
Run the show on top.
Essentially.
Yeah, yeah, a king who's not dethroned. He's a king exactly.
That's true. And Adler wrote that they retain the center of the stage without effort. They're generally pampered, and they form a style of life based on being supported by others and at the same time ruling them.
Great combination, Yeah, totally. Hodgman talks a lot about being an only child. It's very funny to hear him muse on the stuff. All right, So these theories were out there in the nineteen twenties basically through for about sixty something years, it was sort of just commonly accepted that this was the case. They had done studies it backed up a lot of this, and then a funny thing happened in the nineteen eighties. In fact, in nineteen eighty three, there were a couple of Swiss psychologists, Jules Angst and Cecil Ernst, and they said, you know what, this is all poo poo, and we're going to write our own book called Birth Order Colon. It's poopoo. Actually it's birth order its influence on personality. And they went back looked at all these studies, like fifteen hundred studies from the mid forties to nineteen eighty. A lot of these studies had backed up Adler's theories and stuff like this. But they said, you know what, the closer we looked, the more we picked this apart. There are a lot of fallacies in here. There are a lot of methodological pitfalls. And basically I think that there is like birth order effect really doesn't have anything to do with personality at least no much more than anything else that we could kind of find out.
Yeah, they definitely poo pooted it. One of the examples they gave was that there was a meta analysis of previous previous studies of birth order findings, which means that it's a they compile a bunch of findings from a bunch of different studies and apply statistical analysis of it. They turned these smaller sample sizes into one large sample size, and of course it found a positive correlation between the birth order and personality traits. But those particular researchers said, well, we didn't actually include any studies that didn't find a positive correlation between birth order and personality traits. We only studied ones that did show that. That's like does some junk science right there. And that's the kind of thing that Angst and Ernst were saying, like, this is the quality of the studies heretofore and when you really look at the methodology and all the like their findings, like it just does not add up that you can't replicate them.
Yeah, they in fact it they had a pretty sick burn. They called it post hoc theory, which is basically like you can go into these studies and you can find whatever you're looking for if you kind of just pick apart different parts of it and cherry picked different parts of it. And they use one good example they use was anxiety and which children in a family had the highest anxiety levels and reported those levels. And they said, you know, if you look if you're Adler or others, you have an explanation for all of them. So if it's the youngest, it's because you're the weakest sibling. Which is that true?
I think they mean physically, your older siblings are generally bigger and stronger than you.
Is that true?
Typically? Sure? I mean you compare like a tripy four year old to a ten year old. Ten year old beat up on the four year old any day of the week.
Well, we'll get to the snapshot in time thing. Because I thought they meant overall, like I grew up to be the smallest and weakest.
No, but yeah, you just touched on a huge problem that we'll get you there.
Don't No, I didn't NeSSI put it in it in my brain. If the oldest of the family reported being the most anxious, then they said, oh, well, it's because they had an experienced mother, and if it was the middle it was because they were neglected. So they're like, you can't do that.
That's not science, right exactly, And they pretty much definitively removed birth order influencing personality as a field of psychology like psychology turned its back on that, and that was it for a dozen years essentially, maybe a little more. But before their book, or Angston Ernst's book came out back in the seventy I think actually nineteen seventy, there was a psychologist named Frank Solaway. He was working on his doctorate think at the time, and he had a professor that that was into birth order as this is again this is before the Swiss study of the Swiss book came out and made Swiss cheese a birth order. And the Soloway's professor said, you know what, Charles Darwin, let's just talk about Darwin for a second. He said, sit down, Soilhaway, sit down, I've been wanting to talk to you about this. Charles Darwin came up with one of the most radical theories that science has ever produced in coming up with natural selection and evolution. Right, But did you know that Darwin's mentor the person that had the greatest influence on his work his entire career, a geologist named Charles Lyle, did not accept that that we have all from apes. Did not accept natural selection. He could not accept it. And in fact, Lyle was in quite a quite a pickle because he prized science and reason and his protoce had just used science and reason to show that humans are no different than animals, and Lyle was like, no, reason is what separates us from animals. So he had a really hard time accepting that, and so Sos College professor pointed to Darwin being a later born and having a much more ability to think freely and Lyle being a firstborn and thinking much more conservatively as the explanation to that very famous gulf between the two.
Yeah, which is a stretch for me, even though I think there's a lot to birth order. That one is, I don't know. It's a stretch. But Soloway it was like, interesting, let me look into this a little more. I want to see if this is a reasonable assumption or theory at least. And he ended up writing a book in nineteen ninety six called Born to Rebel colon Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, and he did his own meta analysis of all of these studies that are out there, and he basically went on to poo poo Oxton Ernst and said Adler was right all along. There's a lot of significance to birth order and how it ties to your personality. And here's why I think this is true because a child occupies a niche in a family, and that niche is determined according to your birth order. So we're calling a birth order, but what it really is is a proxy for what The real things are behind this, which is how big you are, what's your status in that family, what is your power dynamic in that family, what's the age difference and stuff.
Like that, right, and that those are the things that really influence your personality. But they all are, at the end of the day, tied into birth order. It's just not birth order in and of itself, but the qualities that come with birth order.
Right, Yeah, which seems like splitting hairs, but maybe no one had split that hair yet.
I mean, it makes sense to me. It definitely removes it from any kind of like astrological stuff, because birth order if you're like, yeah, you're a middle child, so you're all these things, not oh yeah you're smaller than your older brother, so you have a you don't like being touched kind of thing. I don't know. It makes sense. It takes it and actually provides an explanation to it. And by the way, I just want to point out, get this, chuck. So he started this research in nineteen seventy, release the book in nineteen ninety six, right smack dab in the middle of that twenty five ish years of research, that Swiss book came out. Can You imagine dedicating thirteen years of research and then all of a sudden some book comes along and completely disproves everything you've been working on.
Yeah.
But Frank's al always was the kind of be like, Nope, they're wrong, I'm right, I'm going to keep going.
Yeah, And for him, family dynamics all came down to a Darwinian power struggle basically between these siblings for affection from their parents. So again, if you're first born, you're gonna basically act as a surrogate parent to your younger siblings. Not because you have some great desire to teach those kids, but you're looking at mom and dad and saying, like, see how much I'm helping, Like I'm helping be like little mommy or little Daddy. It's why they respect authority, it's why they're conscientious, and it's why they identify more with parents. The younger kids they and again this says lacks of physical strength. I guess presumably just because they're younger in that snapshot in time, which we'll get to don't spoil in, Chuck, but they have what he called low power strategies. So still had strategies as far as this power struggle, in the family, but more like, hey, let me use humor or social intelligence to get their affection instead of you know, like physical things.
They were the kids that were more likely to spend their allowance on a bow tie that spins.
Do you ever have one of those?
No? I never did. I added like a little clip on bow tie for Easter if I remember correctly.
Yeah, it's a thing. I know a couple of bow tie guys.
I learned how to tie a bow tie for mine and Yumi's wedding.
Actually, so you were one then yes? Are you like, nah, just practice? Yeah. I can't pull off a bow tie. It's not a good look for me.
Oh yeah, I'd like to see that. Let me be the judge of that. Okay, all right, okay, well you tie it for me. I yes, I will. I know how to. I'm a little rusty, but I can get it back.
Well, you know, you got to stand behind me and wrap your arms around me and do it that way. Of course, if you do it in front, it's like it's weird.
And then afterwards we'll do that funny thing where it looks like you have four arms and I'm hiding behind you, and we'll do all sorts of weird stuff.
And then after that, I'll get behind you and teach you how to swing a golf club.
Okay, fair enough, it's all in the.
Hips, all right. So from that power dynamic to wrap it up and that power struggle, we also have the middle children. And these are the ones again because you're in the middle, you're more likely to cooperate, you're more into diplomacy, and you're probably mediating fights between the oldest and the youngest, which did not track in my family. My sister and my brother and I didn't fight a lot, but if there was sibling fighting going on, it was usually me and my brother because we were closer in age. My sister was six when I was born, so I was her little baby boy, and so she and I never had a lot of fights and stuff, gotcha.
So one of the other things that Soulo we spent his time on was he basically did the same thing Francis Galton did. He profiled a bunch of different people to kind of support his point. I read that he he basically created a database of sixty five hundred and sixty six historical people who were meaning they were all dead, who were involved in one hundred and twenty one different political and scientific upheavals from the scientific or sorry, from the French Revolution, Protestant Reformation, Darwin's theory of natural selection. And then he looked at a bunch of different factors, but one of those factors was birth order. And what he found was I saw an interview with him. He said that, yeah, there's a bunch of different stuff that influence our personality, our behavior. I think he controlled for two hundred and fifty six different ones like age, religion, class, education, and he said, yes, some of those things influence our personality, but he said nothing packs the wallop of birth order. He basically said, it's birth order everybody.
Yeah, yeah, And.
He gave some examples.
Right, well, yeah, I mean if you look if he did sort of the same thing that others have done, which is to point at famous people in history and say, well, see, look at this person. They were the first born and they did this. Look at King David, right, look at King David. In this case, he said, look at Mussolini and look at Stalin. I believe Stalin was not the firstborn, but his siblings died in infancy, so he was sort of de facto firstborn.
Yeah, they call it the psychological firstborn. That's the emphasis they put on it.
Yeah. So he said, look at these people, they were firstborns and they were monsters. And look at Marx and Darwin and Gandhi and they were all later borns. And you know, when you start breaking it down, though, and you say, oh, what about like Isaac Newton or Einstein? That goes against your idea because both of those guys were firstborns, and it went against the common thinking that the later borns were going to be the ones to come up with these revolutionary thoughts.
Yeah.
And he said, oh yeah, but you know what, the people that supported them were two to ten times more likely to be later born's.
Right. So he did the opposite in those two cases when he pointed to something like he said, Lincoln was a second child and he had the revolutionary thinking of ending slavery. Yeah, and that's an example of basically being reductivist, Like he boiled down these huge historical machinations down to one individual to point to prove his point. Right, Yeah, Lincoln and in slavery and he was a second born. And then he does the opposite with examples that don't fit like you said. Einstein and Newton, well they were first born, but their supporters were two to ten times more likely to be later born. So now he takes it from the individual and boils it back out to a bunch of different people having to do with these revolutions and thinking. It's pretty emblematic from what I've read of his argument.
Yeah, and I love Dave rus who put this together. He inserts little jokes here and there just for us, but sometimes we like to bring them out on the show. He wrote that ten times more likely and then put whatever, pal right, it's good stuff.
Yeah, so Born to Rebel was a rebel. I've been wanting to say that the whole time. Okay, it should be elll e really if you think about it. But okay, so it became, I think when a bestseller. It was a really popular book despite being pretty scientific. I think half of it was scientific annotations and bibliography. But I believe he wrote it in like a way that you know, the average person could could digest, and it really made waves because again he comes along thirteen years after psychology was like, okay, great, that's done. Birth order has nothing to do with anything. He said, Nope, it's the most important driver of personality everybody. So he was widely criticized for it, including by another controversial thinker in psychology, Judith rich Harris. And she was controversial, like I said, because she was kind of tangential to the field. She was kicked out of Harvard during while she was working on her doctorate, and later on was awarded with a prestigious award that was named after the director of the psychology department who kicked her out, So she came full circle. But she was kind of considered like an outside thinker. But her whole jam was actually parents have like the least influence on kids' genes and peers that really shape people's individual personalities. And she basically said, no, Soloway is just totally full of it and this doesn't hold water at all.
Yeah, and she had her own sick burns. Yeah, that I think was sicker than the earliest sickburn she said. Quote it is never surprising when the originator of a theory produces evidence that supports the theory. The real test of the theory is whether other people, working independently of the originator of the theory produce evidence that supports it pretty good burn.
It is a great burn. So I say we take our second break, because that basically puts sol Away away for now. This is ninety six, and he got shouted down typically, but his work definitely brought it back into the popular mainstream, which is why still today you see like parenting sites and psychology sites like referring to the stuff as if it's true and real. So but yeah, I say we move on, and we use an ad break as a transition for that.
Let's do it and shot shot.
Okay, So slow Away really roughle a lot of feathers, And it took another decade or two before people finally like got around to conducting about as legitimate a meta analysis of the previous studies that you could possibly do, or they compiled their own studies based on really large sample sizes. Because if birth order is a thing, and birth order applies to everybody, including only children, then if you get a bunch of people together, birth order is going to show up in some way, shape or form, because it's there among everybody. It's not like some people have some sort of birth order. Everybody who's ever born has some sort of ranking, even only children. And yet when you look at really good data using really good methodology, it just does not come to the surface.
That's right. This one was very large in twenty fifteen. It looked at data from three hundred and seventy seven thousand high school students in the United States. Then there was another study in the same year that analyzed data from about twenty thousand students in Europe and Germany in the US as well and UK. And there were a couple of psychologists, Rodika Damien and Brent W. Roberts from the Fighting Aliini of the University of Illinois. I'm not sure what an Aliini is.
It's an Illinoianite, is it all right?
And that sounds about right? Okay, But they fight, I know that, right, They're always fun. But they they isolated that they tried to do, you know, controls for everything as well, and they looked at everything, which included of course, birth order and then you know, the sex of the of the kid, and the number of siblings, size, socio economics of it all, and all this stuff. And they basically said, this is the largest study that we've ever done, the most sophisticated of its kind, and there is little to no functional relation between birth order and personality like full stop.
Right, Yeah, full stop is right. And those same psychologists, Damien and Roberts, they wrote something they wrote basically like an editorial in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which also published their study of the three hundred and seventy seven thousand high school students. That is such a huge sample size, and they basically said in this editorial letter, here are all the problems from the previous study. There's just flaws galore. And they basically divided the types of studies for examining birth order into two different categories. There was the between family study design and the within family study design. And the between family study design said it just looked at a bunch of people who weren't related and then pulled them about their birth order and then looked at their individual personality traits. Within family design looked at the actual members of a single family or multiple single families, and then examined the personality traits based on their birth order in relation to the other members of their family, their sibship.
Yeah, and it seemed to hold a lot more water when you just looked at the family designs within a family and not between a bunch of these different families. Like this is when it started to make sense a little more for me. But at the same time, like, I don't feel it's too horoscopy to see that there's a lot of correlation between some of these traits, right, but the science doesn't hold up then it's just anecdotal basically.
Well, what they were saying was so like, if you're looking at a between family design, you're not taking into account typically the number of siblings total. You're just taking account the birth order. And that they're saying that if you look at something like the number of firstborns versus later borns, there's more later borns than firstborn so there's only one firstborn in a family, but there can be multiple later borns, right, And that firstborns typically are smarter, they have a higher IQ. That will get to in a second is actually true, and that a lot of it has to do with them coming from families of high socioeconomic status, and that that's not controlled for. If you don't control for the SIB ship size, then your methodology is just crud. That was just one of multiple problems they had with it.
Yeah, and if you're the what if you're from a large Catholic family of like eight kids and you're seven, six eight or five of eight, Like, does all this stuff just go out the door at that point?
If birth order is is true, then no, it wouldn't like there you would have multiples in the middle, like sharing similar traits. I would guess, right, But that's not the case. And then they did another little victory lap and they basically said, oh, there's a couple of other things that are sacred cows in the field of birth order and personality. One is that it's it's it differs by gender, that birth order personality traits show up way more in males than females. And they were like, no, that's not true at all. We study that as part of this meta analysis. Nope, it's not correct. The other one is that, okay, birth order really starts to get diluted when you look at the full range of siblings in a family, especially if there's you know, a decade or more in between the oldest and the youngest, because really birth order only shows up between siblings that are separated by no more than five years. So it gets I louted if you'l like at the whole thing, and they said, nope, we shrunk everything down to just five year gaps between siblings tops, and it still did not show up. So they just absolutely trounced down the theory in every single way they could, using the best data in the best methodology, and they said, guys, it just it's not real. Can we please stop talking about this?
Yeah, and someone else is going to come along because people can't stop talking about and researching berth On.
It's true, Yeah, if we look for it.
It really is. Because as I was doing this, I was sort of into thinking about if I felt this is true or not, or what about my family? And then I was like, who cares? H And that's I guess why. It's pop psychology to a certain degree. I mean, these findings are sort of interesting, I guess, But what's the end game as far as what are we really learning, as far as like what makes it us better families or better as a as a human race? Like probably nothing.
Well to me, it's an example of that that trait of twentieth century science that's like a compulsion to find the one reason that something happens, and this is a great example of that. But it's also again I think it's because we're all like confronted one way or another with birth order and made our own observation. So it's it's just kind of almost a folk psychology, you know.
Yeah, I agree. So we were going to talk about IQ because it is true that when you look at the data in the numbers that firstborn's score highest on IQ tests. It's not a lot. What I found was like a point, so it's not some huge difference on average.
I don't think it's not a shameful difference.
It's not a shameful difference, but it was there, and there's a guide that has a really interesting take on all this. As his name was James, I don't know how you would say it. Junk is the only way I can say it.
Yeah, that's what people call him in the bars, probably.
Z A j O N c ze yunk oh XEONK.
I'm going with James ze yunk, right, and the whole the whole name flows like teeny others. James Zyunk is.
The youngster yea. So uh he he looked at SAT scores. I found this pretty interesting. Actually, he started in nineteen sixty seven, when there was a big drop in verbal SAT scores that went on for about ten years, and of course people at the time were saying, oh, it's because of this, it's because of that, it's because these children. These days, our society is just going down the drain. People are getting dumber. But later than that, about ten years later, in seventy six, he said, here's what I predict. SAT scores are going to continue to go down for about four more years, and then in nineteen eighty they're going to start to go up again. And this is why, everybody, because there was a baby boom in our and there were a lot of firstborn children because of that baby boom that were born in nineteen forty nine, so that means they would be taking the SAT in about nineteen sixty seven. That's when scores peaked because firstborns, as we all know, are smarter. And then as each successive child is born from sixty seven on, they're not going to be as smart, and so these SAT scores are going to go down. But once we hit nineteen eighty, at all resets, because that baby boom stopped in sixty two, and if you were born in sixty two, you're going to take the SAT in nineteen eighty, So these scores are going to go back up, and they did.
Yeah, because between nineteen forty nine and nineteen sixty two there was it was much likelier that you were a second born than a first born compared to the beginning of the baby boom. So he basically just dropped the mic right there because it turned out that that's exactly what happened, Like his prediction came true. And what he showed was like, yep, birth order has to do with IQ. It's just as simple as that. It was later followed up or supported by a study from the Netherlands of four hundred thousand military recruits. They found the same thing with IQ score. And remember the SAT test used to test your IQ. And so what did I come up with? Zionk? Yeah, sure, James Zionk. He had a pretty neat theory or an explanation or hypothesis of why that would be true. And he said that it was based on what we talked about earlier, that if you're an older sibling, even like a second born sibling, as long as you're not the baby, you have the ability or you have the opportunity I mean to teach somebody else and to teach stuff. You have to know stuff. You have to be paying attention, you have to be aware, you have to be absorbing information, and that you have less and less of an opportunity to teach as more and more kids are born, because you're sharing that function with other second or later born kids, and then if you're the baby, you have no opportunity to teach. So you're just the dumbest of the bunch essentially, at least as far as Xiank's theory went, and again it's backed up by SAT and IQ scores. But thankfully you're saying that it's not that ridiculous of a difference between firstborn and last born.
Yeah, I think that teaching function carries a little weight.
Definitely, it makes sense at least.
Yeah, it makes sense. A lot of this makes it.
But if there was any warning from this entire episode, it's that just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's correct.
Exactly, because we mentioned this a few times, put that pin in it, We're going to take that pin out because a very sort of keen thing to be aware of with all of this is when they do these studies, you are looking at a point in time, a snapshot in time of when someone does this study, it might be when the siblings are eighteen, fourteen, and nine. You do that same study with that same family when you know ten years later, and they might you might get wildly different results on who these people are and what their personality is like. So it's you know, you really have there's so many things to account for. I don't know that you can draw some sweet conclusion, like everyone keeps desperately trying to do right.
Yeah, and it makes sense too, because I mean it's called the perfect age compound if you're looking at just a snapshot in time. Of course, the eighteen year old oldest born is going to be more conscientious than the nine year old baby of the family. That's just how it works. That has to do with growing up right, not where you were born, in your sibship, your position. And then also, of course the nine year old's going to be more likely to wander off into the woods and have fun with their friends than the eighteen year old. That's just part of being young. So that definitely explains it quite a bit to me if you ask me.
Yeah, and I think where I end up is like I think there is a lot to birth order and I think it's bound to have an effect on who you turn out to be, along with a lot of other factors in your life. But I think it's one of them.
Okay, well there you go. Well Chuck said he thinks it's one of them, which of course triggers listener me.
I'm going to call this a follow up on France's Kelsey, which I thought was pretty cool. We did a shorty recently on Francis Kelsey, one of the heroes of the FDA, and we got a letter from Katie entitled, my sister's hero was Francis Kelly. Dearest Josh, Chuck, Jerry, and Dave's spirit. David appreciates that. Thank you. You guys have no idea how thrilled I was to listen to today's short stuff about Francis Kelsey. This woman is my sister Sarah's hero. Like Sarah put a portrait of doctor Kelsey in her child's nursery. Hero, my sister Sarah has been telling us for years about the important contribution that Kelsey made to public health and women's health as a whole, but specifically to maternal, infant, child, and adolescent health. And that sounds after I read this, I was like, oh man, I wish we could have done a full thing on Francis Kelsey. Sarah works tirelessly in adolescent sexual health despite all the fire public health has been under for the past few years. Her devotion to protecting the health of teens, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, or citizen status makes me proud to be her sister. I'm so happy at Public Servant was highlighted on your show. Thanks from the bottom of my heart for sharing the story so more will know about doctor Kelsey's works. From a long time listener, Katie. Katie, this is great and Sarah love that you're doing this good work. It's amazing and I'm curious about your birth order now.
Very nice. That was a great email, Katie. That was a very sweet thing to send us, So thank you for it. And hats off to YouTube Sarah. Like Chuck said, and if you want to look up to your older sibling or younger sibling or whatever, we'd love to hear that. You can send it to us in an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
