Stuff You Should Know - Birth Order: So nice, we did it twice

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

This 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!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. 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's 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 and everybody with the birth order episode round two. We hope you like it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan and Jerry's here. And you put the three of us together.

You got a pretty good Sipship going. Sipship, is that a word? I hope you didn't read that one thing I sent you. I did, but I didn't pick out that word. Yes, Sipship, it is the total siblings in a family. I love that. Isn't that neat? Yeah.

And you can have high subships. It means your parents got it on a bunch of times without any protection. The second is the low subship, which means your parents were maybe a little cold to one another. And then the third one, the mid-sid-sid-sid-ship,

which I just made up, but I like threes. Or low means 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. Oh, the something for, 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 name that has an acronym that just spells. 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, 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 chops and apple shosh. 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 it'll come back again and then it's going again

And then it's gonna come back at you one more time kind of like that. Yeah, so we're gonna go over those ups and downs I'm sure we'll toss in our own opinions here and there. They have no basis in science. Sure Because I have a as everyone knows I'm the youngest I know I have an older brother. It's three years older Yeah, Scott that we three years older. Yeah. Scott, we've talked about a lot. So great. He's the best. And I have a sister that is six years older.

She's the eldest sister, Michelle. She's also great. Yeah. 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 the grain of salt like if you have the surprise maybe that's 14 years younger than anyone else in your family.

Things might 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 going to be bossier, you're probably going to be an overachiever, maybe a perfectionist, maybe a little neurotic. If you're the middle child or the second born, you're probably going to 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 going to be adventurous because you were left to your own devices and you answered 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 should do a whole thing on only as I think. Sure. They very much resemble of the other ones. They much more resemble the first born child. But a weirder version of a first born. So the thing is, 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 in, you know, any one of these things.

So you just kind of make 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 first born 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 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 is pop psychology for sure. Yeah, so pop. So, We should go back to the beginning, I guess,

which is to say the 19th century, as far as the science on birth order goes, to 1874 with someone named, that we've talked about a few times on the show, Francis Galton had known that we've talked about a few times on the show. Francis Galton had know that we talked about Galton on episodes where he talked about eugenics. Sure. 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 finger printing 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 gonna say it was adapted into a series of bud-like commercials, like. Yeah, that's what it seems like. Colin, of course, their nature and nurture in which he basically was kind of keen to investigate

the origin of genius. So what better place to go than to study the gentleman of the Royal Society of London, the oldest scientific academy in the world? And he got 99 guys. It's very strange that he didn't get a hundred but he didn't get a hundred and he did a lot of research and got a lot of data on these gentlemen uh... including uh... birth order stuff yeah but also mothers hair color he measured their heads he really went to town on these ninety nine

english men of science and what he found out when he kind of crunched all the data was that sixty one of the ninety nine the data was that 61 of the 99 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, or they were eldest sons, or if they were middle born, they were toward the top of the middleborn, the earlier side of the middleborn cohort. That's right. And if there was no effect on birth order and genius, then it should have been basically 45 and a half, 45 and a half. Right. And spare a thought for those poor half people. That's right.

What about the other 10% though? I think that's that's Jerry. Okay. So wait, wait, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right. So do no. Yeah. 40, did I say 49 and a half or 45 and a half? Well, what do you think? Let me rephrase that and say 49 and a half. Okay, okay. I got you, because you came up with 91. I did, didn't I? So I got it wrong too. I said, what about the 10 people?

It's really nine people. Yeah, plus you said 10%. 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 and the voice of smegel Okay, let's see do you remember I think I do So I like to think smegel lives in you in way. A little bit. Okay. So we said that, oh man,

elders sons have on the whole decided advantages of nurture over the younger ones, their treated boys, companions by their parents, and have earlier responsibility, both of which would develop independence of character and Unless well-to-do families the oldest child has the advantage of better Nerschmitt in his infancy compared to the later board siblings Pretty close. I feel like that was smiegel's brother

Spiegel Spiegel in Spiegel Not bad though, so how do you remember what Spiegel sounds like? I like I listen to that every night. Okay. Let's might go to bed music. That makes sense so if you were to This advantage 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 going to be more independent. And then if you're a family that's maybe doesn't have as much money, then if you're the oldest, then you're going to get the chicken on the

table and not be fighting for that chicken. Yeah. 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-poo's, 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. It's echoed still today in our ideas of birth order and explaining it. Yeah

So that was Francis Galton will leave him and I think probably until I guess about the Actually not that far after I think he was speaking he wrote and what the Last quarter of the the 19th century, right? So I mean just less than 50 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 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. Sure. 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 too, so he might have been Freudian. And Freudian. And Freudian. Yeah might have been Freudian.

Freudian Freud. 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 split up. They split up. Yeah. But Adler's ideas went on. It's definitely worth looking into. He basically says that the whole, 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, you 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 a hundred years ago. that is working toward positivity and equality. He was way ahead of his time,

because this guy was writing a 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 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 he said, a lot of people hang their head

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 of 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. Yeah.

They were, you know, at one point, if you were the first born, 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 take. Yep. So let's take a break, yes?

Yes. Smingle, what do you think? Yes! Perfect. And we're gonna come back and break down his thoughts on this whole dethroning with that meant, right after this. ["Smeagle"] My name's Lverene Cox. I'm an actress, producer, fashionista, and host of the Leverene Cock Show. You may remember my work-winning first season? I've been pretty busy, but

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Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Alright, 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.

Yeah, that can make you pretty neurotic. For sure. 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

going to be pretty hardworking and that perfectionist thing comes in pretty conscientious. Yes. So that's the oldest, right? That's right. Next is 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. If the kids finding like they're just constantly or being beat by the older sibling who doesn't even seem to be aware that they're in a competition, they're just constantly are being beat 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 gonna go the exact opposite way and start following the grateful debt. Like Tina Yathers did. Exactly. Man, that name.

That name was show. It doesn't matter, Tina Yathers,. Exactly. Man, that name. That name. It doesn't matter. Tina Yathers, it's the ultimate name. It was, there's Mallory, Alex, and. Tina Yathers. Yeah, if they didn't use Tina Yathers, I think that was a big miss that the writers walked past. I know, and they should only have called her by

Tina Yathers, not Tina. Right, exactly. And then like in the credits, it says, Tina Yathers, as Tina Yathers. Yeah, that, exactly. And then like in the credits, it says teeny others, it says teeny others. Yeah, that's 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 is trying to live up to this older brother Sigmund. And he sort of had issues with it. He always was trying to live up to this older brother Sigmund, 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 gonna catch up to his eldest brother, at least in birth order. Well, that's right. He also had two younger brothers. One, a doored addler kind of bucked the trend. The other one felt competitive with addler. So he was in the position that addler was with Sigmund. Yeah. The middle child, so say 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 frequently feel forgotten, ignored, neglected, jammed Brady-ish. 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, family barbecue, I'm gonna go hang out at my friend's house instead. I'd 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 uniter. 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's actually fall apart. Exactly. Well, because also in my family, 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 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. Sure. Yeah. Scott. 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 attention

on me by the time I came around. Oh, yeah. So you can do your own thing, but they just, there was not a lot of attention on me by the time I came around. No, yeah, you say you could do your own thing, right? Yeah, exactly. Gotcha. So, well, here we are then at 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 it's sort of the black sheep of 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 where he loses me a little bit, I mentions 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 he got, you know, he had some really great theories, and then one of the big problems of early 20th 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 prove 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 the advantage of being the sole recipient of their parents' attention and focus and love and adoration just like a first-born child, but they never go through the trauma of being dethroned. So they are basically little kings and queens who roam the stage essentially. Yeah, a king who's not dethroned. Exactly. 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. A Hodgman talks a lot about being a only child. It's very funny to hear him use on the stuff. All right, so these theories were out there in the 1920s, basically through for about 60-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 1980s. In fact, in 1983, there were a couple of Swiss psychologists, Jules Anx and Cecil Ernst, and they said, you know what? This is all poo poo. And we're gonna write our own book called Birth Order, Colin, It's poo poo. Actually, it's birth order, it's influence on personality. And they went back, looked at all these studies, like 1500 studies from the mid 40s to 1980. A lot of these studies had, you know,

backed up Adler's theories and stuff like this. But they said you know what the closer we look the more we pick 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 find out. Yeah, they definitely put it. One of the examples they gave was that there was a meta-analysis of previous studies of birth order findings, which means that it's a compiled a bunch of findings from a bunch of different studies and applies statistical analysis of it. They turn 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, there's some junk science, right there, and that's the kind of thing that Anxen Ernst was saying, like, this is the quality of the studies here to four, and when you really look at the methodology and all the, like their findings, like, this does not add up,

that you can't replicate them. Yeah, they infected it. They had a pretty sick burn. They called it post- not add up, so you can't replicate them. Yeah, in fact, 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 pick different parts of it. And they used one good example they used was anxiety and which children in a family had the highest anxiety levels and reported those levels.

And they said, you know, if you're aadler 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, compared like a,

sure before you're old to a 10 year old, 10 year old, you're gonna beat up on the four year old any day of the week. Well, we'll get to this snapshot in time thing because I thought they met overall. Right. Like I grew up to be the smallest and weakest. No, but yeah, you just touched on a huge problem that will get you later.

Don't blow it now. And I said, put a pin in it. My brain. Thank you. If the oldest of the family reported being the most anxious, then they said, oh, well, it's because they had an experience 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 Einstein Ernst's book out, back in the 70s, I think actually 1970, there was a psychologist named Frank Sullaway. He was working on his doctorate, I think, at the time. And he had a professor that was into birth order.

This was, again, this is before the Swiss study, the Swiss book came out, it made Swiss cheese of birth order. And the soloist professor said, you know what, Charles Darwin, let's just talk about Darwin for a second, he said, sit down, soloist, 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 Lyleyle did not accept that we evolved from it, did not accept natural selection, he could not accept it. And in fact, Lyle was in quite a pickle because he prized science and reason and his protégé 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, Solarway's college professor pointed to Darwin, being a later born and having a much more ability to think freely and Lyle being a first born 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 so the way 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 angst Augustine 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 it 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're all they all are in the 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

here, but maybe no one had split that area. 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 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 1970, released the book in 1996, right smack dab in the middle of that 25-ish years of research that Swiss book came out. Can you imagine dedicating 13 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 always was the kind of be like, no, 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 going to 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, and again, this has lack of physical strength, I guess, presumably just because they're younger in that snapshot in time, which we'll get to. Don't spoil the joke. 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 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've always read a bow tie. I had 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 when then? Yes. Are you like nah. No, I just practiced. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. Yeah.

I can pull off a bowtie. 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. Will you tie it for me? Yes, I will. I know how to. I'm a little rusty, but'd like to see that. Let me be the judge of that. Okay. All right. Okay. Will you die 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 I, 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 Soloway 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 basically created a database of 6,566 historical people who were, meaning they were all dead,

who were involved in 121 different political and scientific upheavals from the scientific, sorry, from the French Revolution, the 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 256 different ones, like age, religion, class, education.

And he said, yes, some of those things influence our personality, but he said nothing packs the wall up of birth order. He basically said it's it's birth order everybody. Yeah yeah and he gave some some examples right? Well yeah I mean if you look if he he did sort of the same thing that others have done which is to point at famous people in history and say we'll see look at this person they were the first born and they did this. Look at King David. Right, King David, in this case, he said, look at Mussolini and look at Stalin.

A belief Stalin was not the first born, but his siblings died in infancy. So he was sort of de facto first born. Yeah, they called it the psychological first born. 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 marks and Darwin and Gandhi. They were all laterborns. When you start breaking it down though and you say, oh, what about 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 laterborns were gonna be the ones to come up with these revolutionary thoughts.

Yeah. And he said, yeah, but, you know what, the people that supported them were two to 10 times more likely to be laterborns. 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.

And that's an example of basically being reductivist. Like he boiled down these huge historical machinations down to one individual to prove his point, right? Lincoln and his 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 10 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 Rooz, who put this together. He often inserts little jokes here and there, just for us. But sometimes we like to bring them out on the show.

He wrote that two to nine, ten times more likely, and then put whatever pal. Right. It's good stuff. So born to rebel was a... Reble? I've been wanting to say that the whole time. Okay.

It should be ELLE, really, if you think about it, but okay. So it became, I think, a bestseller. It was a really popular book, despite being pretty scientific. I think it, one of the bestseller. It was a really popular book, despite being pretty scientific. I think it, 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 digest. And it really made waves, because again, he comes along 13 years after psychology was like, okay, great, that's done.

Berthorda has nothing to do with anything. He said, no, 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 gym was, actually, parents have like, the least influence on kids, genes pears that really shaped 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 burn. Yeah, that I think was sicker than the earliest sick burn She said quote, there's never surprising when the originator of a theory produces evidence that supports the theory. The real test of a 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 solo way and away for now. This is 96 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. My name is Leverand Cox. I'm an actress, producer, fashionista, and host of the LeVern Cox Show. You may remember my work-winning first season? I've been pretty busy, but

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so it's still a way really rough a lot of feathers, and it took another decade or two before people finally got around to conducting about as legitimate a meta-analysis of 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, 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 2015. It looked at data from 370,000 high school students in the United States. Then there was another study in the same year that analyzed data from about 20,000 students in Europe and Germany and the US as well and U.K. And there were a couple of psychologists, Rodicadamian and Brent W. Roberts from the Fighting Align Eye of the University of Illinois. I'm not sure

what an Align Eye is. It's an Illinois inite. Is it? All right, that sounds about right. Okay. But they fight. I know that. Right. they're always fighting. But they isolated, they tried to do controls for everything as well. And they looked at everything, which included, of course, birth order, and then, you know, the sex of the kid. And the number of siblings in the subsides. Socio, economics of it all. And all this stuff, and they basically said 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 uh... and those same psychologist damian and robert's they wrote something they wrote basically like a editorial in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences which also published their study of the 377,000 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 examine the personality traits based on their birth order in relation to the other members of their family their citizenship. 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 that This is when it started to make sense, a little more for me. But at the same time, I don't feel it's too horoscopy to see that there's a lot of correlation between some of these traits.

But if 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 laterborns, there's more laterborns than firstborns. There's only one firstborn in the family But there can be multiple later borns, right? And that first borns typically are smarter. They have a higher IQ that we'll 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's not controlled for. If you don't control for the Sib Ship size, then your methodology's just crud. That was just one of multiple problems they had with it. Yeah, and what if you're from a large Catholic family

of like eight kids and you're seven, six of eight or five of eight? Does all this stuff just go out the door at that point? If birth order is true, then no, it wouldn't. 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 differs by gender. That 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 and females. And they were like, nope, that's not true at all. We, we studied that in 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

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 diluted if you look at the whole thing. And they said, no, we shrunk everything down to just five-year gaps between siblings, tops, and it still did not show up. So they just absolutely trounced on the theory in every single way they could using the best data and the best methodology. And they said, guys, 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 Perth or true. Yeah, 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? Yeah, 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 in game as far as what are we really learning

as far as like what makes us better families or better as a human race? Like, probably nothing. Well, to me, it's an example of that trait of 20th 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 confronted one way or another with birth order and made our own observations. So it's just kind of almost a folk psychology, you know? Yeah, I agree. So we were gonna talk about IQ because it is true that when you look at the data in the numbers,

that first born 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. His name was James.

I don't know how you would say it. Zajank 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. Z-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A SAT scores. I found this pretty interesting actually. He started in 1967 when there was a big drop in verbal SAT scores that went on for about 10 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 10 years later,

in 76, he said, here's what I predict. SAT scores are going to continue to go down for about four more years, and then in 1980, they're going to start to go up again. And this is why everybody, because there was a baby boom in our country, and there were a lot of first born children because of that baby boom that were born in 1949. So that means they would be taking the SAT in about 1967.

That's when scores peaked because first borns, as we all know, are smarter. And then as each successive child is born from 67 on, they're not going to be as smart. And so these SAT scores are going to go down. But once we hit 1980, it all resets. Because that baby boom stopped in 62, and if you were born in 62, you're going to take the SAT in 1980. So these Scores are going to go back up and they did. Yeah.

Because between 1949 and 1962, 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 400,000 military

recruits. They found the same thing with IQ score. Remember, the SAT test used to test your IQ. And so, what did I come up with? Zionk? Yeah, 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 the yonks theory went. And again, it's backed up by SET and IQ scores. But thankfully, you're saying that it's not that ridiculous of a difference between first born 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 sense though. 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're looking at a point in time, a snapshot in time of when someone does this study, it might be when the siblings are 18, 14 and nine. You do that same study with that same family when 10 years later, and 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 sweeping conclusion like everyone keeps desperately trying to do. Right. Yeah, 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 18-year-old oldest born is gonna 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 in your citizenship Your position and then also of course the nine year old's gonna be more likely to wander off into the woods and have fun with Their friends than the 18 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... ...listen to me. I'm going to call this...

...the follow-up on Francis 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 Sisters Hero, was Francis Kelly. Dearest Josh Chuck Jerry and Dave's spirit. I didn't appreciate 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 Dr. Kelsey and her child's nursery hero. Wow. 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. After I read this, I was like, oh man, I wish we could have done a full thing on Francis Kelsey. Sarah works tirelessly and 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. So happy a public servant was highlighted on your show. Thanks from the bottom of my heart from for sharing this story. So more will know about Dr. Kelsey's work. 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. Very nice. That was a great email, Katie. That was a very sweet thing to send us, so thank you for it. And it's off to you to 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 StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hello, this is Leverand Cox. I'm an actress, producer and host of the Leverand Cochishine. Do you like your tea with lemon or honey? History making Broadway performer Alex Newell. When I sing the Holy Ghost shows up, that's my ministry and I know that well about me.

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