What psychological phenomenon do you believe in but cannot prove? I'd have to go with birth order. Having grown up with three siblings, I can't help but be convinced that my birth order (I'm the second oldest) has had a profoundly important influence on my personality.
That said, birth order is mostly bunk. Numerous scientific studies and meta-analyses have found that the phenomenon doesn't seem to exist. There are few, if any, personality traits that consistently correlate with a child's order within the family.
But I'm not giving up on my empirical hunch. Like all good rationalizers, I can find bits and pieces of evidence to support my untenable belief:
If you grew up with an older brother or sister and thought it was a mixed blessing, there's some new research that lends credence to that sentiment. A team of economists looked at data on the extracurricular activities of 10th-graders across the United States and found an interesting pattern. Girls with an older sibling were less likely to participate in non-athletic extracurricular activities, like yearbook, newspaper, youth groups, community service, music, and art. On the other hand, boys with an older sibling were more likely to participate in athletic extracurricular activities, like baseball, football, and swimming, though they were less likely to participate in youth groups, music, or art. The gender of the older sibling did not matter. The authors believe this pattern could be due to differences in attention or support from parents, or because of the way older siblings act as role models or mentors.
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The male fraternal birth order effect (higher incidence of male homosexuality with more older male brothers) has been authenticated. There was a paper in PNAS a few years ago.
There was an interesting article in Time Magazine back in October on this: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1672715,00.html
I don't remember how scientific is it, but their findings mostly correlated with me and my siblings' characteristics.
Why does influence for birth order intuitively seem a real phenomenon to many people even though there isn't much in the way of research support? Here's one possibility -- while there may not be consistent patterns across families, one's particular position in any given family still matters. That's because family relational dynamics vary from one family to the next. Consider that in one family, being the baby could come with specific benefits that outweigh the costs, but in another family the opposite might be true. Looking at traits of youngest siblings to find consistent patterns across families might, for this reason, be a futile endeavor. But, if you're the youngest sibling in either of the two sibships I described, you might quite rightly feel that your birth position has had a great impact on your development.
Might not birth order make a difference by way of reference to epigenetics, and aren't maternal hormone levels in utero affected by having gestated other, prior offspring? Has any work been done from this perspective vis a vis birth order?
Observationally, (based on limited and biased sampling) I would have to say that younger kids of older parents, in large families, tend to be treated rather laxly in terms of discipline. Explanation: the parents, in their 40s or 50s and beyond, are just too darn tired to lay down the law like they did when they were younger. So I believe that in such circumstances, later birth order children will tend to socialize differently on average, all other things being equal. Not only are older parents more tired from parenting, they are wiser, having made mistakes in rearing younger sets of children.
There was a recent study on birth order that showed oldest children receive more parental attention (but that's no surprise). This increased attention might explain the slight difference in IQs oldest children compared to their siblings. This is a URL to a news brief about it from the BYU webpage.
This is strictly anecdotal, but ask any observant teacher about how birth order plays out in classroom behavior. After a month any reflective teacher can tell you a student's birth order which falls back on some classic stereotypes of personality traits for birth order: only (loner), oldest (bossy/leader), youngest (attention seeker), or middle (people pleaser).
Interesting... I too subscribe to the birth order "myth".
From the short amount that I read on Wikipedia, I still believe in it. I don't know if they've looked at the right personality traits.
Introversion and extroversion are clearly more influenced by baseline personality than social pecking order. I think birth order is more important for traits involved in attention-seeking, responsibility, guilt and motivation. Here's my theory:
Youngest: taken less seriously
Middle: not the oldest and not the youngest. Never feels recognized
Oldest: stuck with all the responsibility and baby-sitting
Obviously, these environmental factors can backfire, but I think the result of it is this follows a trend. Youngest children are obsessed with getting external approval. Middle children find unique ways to distinguish themselves (which often takes the form of rebellion - thus, the black sheep phenomenon). And oldest children retain a parenting-personality throughout their lives.
I could be over-raitonalizing from my own experience (good point, Dr X!); this is all anecdotal, but I feel like I've seen this dynamic in my family and the families of friends
Birth Order is far more complex than a simple correlation to position in the family. There are five birth order personalities, only child and first born through fourth born, rather than just the oldest, middle and youngest. I have used this concept successfully in counseling for almost forty years. If you are interested in checking out this understanding of birth order visit my website at www.birthorderplus.com. For an even greater analysis of each personality check out my blog at http://birthorder.blogster.com.
Older siblings buffer and translate for the parents mistakes and weaknesses without a doubt. Behavior patterns
follow with the younger children looking to the older sibling for signals in an unconcious form of communication even if it is not recognized as such until we are older.