Extract from How Is Personality Formed? interview with Frank J. Sulloway, author of Born to Rebel.
Sourced from The Edge
SULLOWAY: There is an important dimension of personality called "agreeableness/antagonism"—one of the Big Five—that exhibits significant differences by birth order. This birth-order difference reflects difference in the niches that firstborns and younger children typically occupy.
Firstborns tend to occupy the niche of a surrogate parent. Acting as a surrogate parent- that is, assisting with child-rearing duties- is a great way to curry favor with parents. For this reason, firstborns tend to identify more closely with their parents, and they also tend to identify with whatever their parents value. Parents value a child's doing well in school, so firstborns are conscientious, do their homework, generally do better at school, and tend to be over-represented as academics and in Who's Who.
The niche of the responsible achiever is particularly likely to be open for an eldest child. Once this niche is taken, it is difficult for a younger sibling to compete effectively for the same niche, although they often try.
The typical strategy of younger siblings is to see whether they can compete successfully in a niche already occupied by an elder sibling. If they cannot, then the best strategy is for the younger sibling to branch out—to become more open to experience—and to try to find some alternative niche where they will not be directly compared with their elder siblings.
If an elder brother is a great spear-thrower and a younger cannot top that, they might as well take up the bow and arrow. And if there is another older sibling already specializing in the bow and arrow, then it pays to invent the crossbow. The general rule, then, is do something different that adds value to the family unit as a whole.
Like Darwin's famous finches, younger siblings are busy diversifying: They are trying to radiate adaptively away from whatever specialized abilities are already represented by siblings who are older than themselves.
These "contrast effects" between siblings explain the relationship between birth order and certain kinds of creativity. Younger siblings are much more likely to accept radical innovations in science and in social thought. Within their own families, they are at the bottom of the pecking order, so they tend to identify more with the underdog and to champion egalitarian causes.
Younger siblings were the earliest backers of the Protestant Reformation, and after it the Enlightenment. Most lost causes in history have been supported by younger siblings and opposed by firstborns. This historical difference goes directly back to the kind of psychological differences in strategic niches that siblings occupy within the family constellation.
JB: You have stated that younger siblings have more in common with their peers than their siblings.
SULLOWAY: On average, firstborns are more similar in personality to firstborns in other families than they are to their own younger siblings. Similarly, a youngest child in one family is often more similar to a youngest child in another family than to his or her own elder siblings. Still, all laterborns are more similar to one another, on average, than they are to firstborns.
JB: How did you test this hypothesis?
SULLOWAY: There are several ways of testing it. In my book Born to Rebel, I engaged in two major empirical assaults on this problem.
The first method of attack involved historical evidence. I gathered data on more than 6,500 participants in major revolutions in science, politics, and social thought. In addition, I arranged for each individual's position in each controversy to be validated by half a dozen or more expert historians. Overall, I asked 110 historical experts to examine my lists of participants in revolutions, and to assess whether these lists were representative of participants as a whole. My experts were also asked to nominate missing individuals, and they rated every participant on a scale of acceptance and rejection. Obtaining these expert ratings involved a tremendous amount of work, in part because I did it in person. I flew a quarter of a million miles around the world as I gathered these expert ratings from scholars in England, France, Germany, Italy, and America.
My second line of research involved a reassessment of the birth-order literature as a whole. There are more than 2,000 publications on this subject, and what was needed was a meta-analysis to determine whether there are more significant findings than would be expected by chance.
In my meta-analysis I tested specific hypotheses about sibling strategies, using the Big Five personality dimensions as my guide.
That is, I expected firstborns—relative to laterborns—to be more:
(1) conscientious;
(2) aggressive;
(3) conventional;
(4) extraverted in the sense of being dominant (laterborns are more extraverted in the sense of being sociable), and;
(5) emotionally volatile, in the sense of being quicker to anger.
All five of these hypotheses were confirmed by my meta-analysis, which involved a statistical survey of 196 birth-order studies controlled for social class and sibship size.
JB: What about the only child?
SULLOWAY: Only children pose another interesting question. I view only children as the ideal controlled experiment. They are what it is like to have no birth-order effects at all: Only children have no siblings, hence they have no sibling rivalry. Two predictions follow from these circumstances. One is that only children ought to be intermediate on many personality traits. This follows because they are not being pushed by a younger sibling into being particularly conscientious or aggressive; and they are not being pushed by an elder sibling into being particularly daring or unconventional. Hence only children ought to be somewhere in the behavioral middle. And this is where they turn out to be.
Secondly, only children are free to occupy any niche they wish to in childhood—for example, they do not have to worry about who is going to move in to occupy a niche that they vacate. For this reason, they are free to roam around. As a result, they ought to be more variable than average in their personality traits and interests, and they are. Only children are the most unpredictable group. Their behavior is difficult to predict precisely because their childhood options are greater than for people who grow up with siblings.
SULLOWAY: Based on Darwinian theory, I argue that offspring are predisposed (genetically) to compete for parental investment. The role of the environment inevitably comes in because individuals—based on the contingencies of birth order, gender, and age spacing—tend to occupy different family niches. This part of the argument is not at all based on genetic determinism. There are no genes for being firstborn or genes for being laterborn. Siblings become very different in large part because different family environments—or niches, if you will—lead them to adopt differing strategies in their efforts to get out of childhood alive.
Because firstborns are bigger than their younger siblings, it is easier for them to employ aggressive and tough-minded tactics, which then become part of their personality. This part of the theory is very much an environmental and interactionist argument. My reasoning in Born to Rebel is like Pinker's argument inThe Language Instinct. There's undoubtedly a hard-wired capacity for humans to engage in verbal communication, a capacity that other apes do not possess. But the country we grow up in determines which language we learn to speak.
In the same way, we are hard-wired in a Darwinian sense to compete with our siblings for parental investment, but the particular aspects of each person's personality are the product of characteristics of the family environment in which one grows up, just as speaking German in one country, and French in another country, are appropriate linguistic differences produced by the same language instinct.
In short, my argument is not just about nature; nor is it just about nurture-it is a combined nature/nurture argument, in which much of the psychological details are clearly on the environmental side.
Image wandered from Vagabond Journey
SULLOWAY: A story proves nothing; it just demonstrates that people have been clever enough to find evidence to fit their hypotheses. The approach I took in Born to Rebel involved testing my hypotheses using large statistical samples, and then illustrating the various relationships I had documented by telling one or more stories that brought these relationships to life. For example, laterborns are more likely to challenge the status quo, and they are more likely to cause their parents aggravation by doing all sorts of outrageous things.
A person who exemplifies this tendency is Voltaire—he got his start as a poet when his family, to amuse themselves, had Voltaire and his elder brother Armand engage in poetry contests. The family soon discovered that Voltaire was a terror at satirical poetry—and he was probably aiming many of his scathing ditties at his elder brother, whom he didn't particularly like. The family put an end to these poetry contests. The father subsequently became concerned that his younger son would end up wasting his life in such an unfruitful profession as literature. "You will starve to death," he warned his son. But a poet had been born, and Voltaire became the richest literary figure in all of eighteenth-century Europe through the sales of his ribald poems, plays, and books. His brother Armand, by the way, became a religious fanatic. What is Voltaire most famous for? His scathing critiques of the Catholic church!
Here is another story about Voltaire that I cannot resist telling. Voltaire once witnessed his father having a vehement argument with his gardener. Voltaire's father was a stubborn man. He finally dismissed the gardener, saying to him, "I hope you find an employer who is as gracious and kind as I am." Voltaire thought this remark was ridiculous-that his father, one of the most irascible people he knew, would tell the employee he had just fired that he would be lucky to find another employer as even-tempered as himself.
Soon after, Voltaire went to see a play. It turned out that there was a scene in the play just like the Voltaire had witnessed between his father and the gardener. After the play was over, Voltaire went to see the playwright and asked him if he would substitute, in the next performance of the play, a few words that were closer to his father's own remarks. Voltaire then went home and invited his father to attend the play. His father accepted, and as the father sat through the play, there finally came the scene with the gardener.
Voltaire wrote of this episode that "My good father was rather mortified."
This story reflects the use of the satirical knife blade, and the turning it in his victim, that Voltaire did to his enemies throughout his career. Some noblemen became so outraged by Voltaire's satirical broadsides that they had him beaten, or arranged for him to have a nice long stay in the Bastille. In any event, these are the kinds of biographical stories that bring a figure like Voltaire alive; and they also illustrates the kinds of unconventional and irreverent qualities that younger siblings have displayed throughout history.
Sourced from The Edge
SULLOWAY: There is an important dimension of personality called "agreeableness/antagonism"—one of the Big Five—that exhibits significant differences by birth order. This birth-order difference reflects difference in the niches that firstborns and younger children typically occupy.
Firstborns tend to occupy the niche of a surrogate parent. Acting as a surrogate parent- that is, assisting with child-rearing duties- is a great way to curry favor with parents. For this reason, firstborns tend to identify more closely with their parents, and they also tend to identify with whatever their parents value. Parents value a child's doing well in school, so firstborns are conscientious, do their homework, generally do better at school, and tend to be over-represented as academics and in Who's Who.
The niche of the responsible achiever is particularly likely to be open for an eldest child. Once this niche is taken, it is difficult for a younger sibling to compete effectively for the same niche, although they often try.
The typical strategy of younger siblings is to see whether they can compete successfully in a niche already occupied by an elder sibling. If they cannot, then the best strategy is for the younger sibling to branch out—to become more open to experience—and to try to find some alternative niche where they will not be directly compared with their elder siblings.
If an elder brother is a great spear-thrower and a younger cannot top that, they might as well take up the bow and arrow. And if there is another older sibling already specializing in the bow and arrow, then it pays to invent the crossbow. The general rule, then, is do something different that adds value to the family unit as a whole.
Like Darwin's famous finches, younger siblings are busy diversifying: They are trying to radiate adaptively away from whatever specialized abilities are already represented by siblings who are older than themselves.
These "contrast effects" between siblings explain the relationship between birth order and certain kinds of creativity. Younger siblings are much more likely to accept radical innovations in science and in social thought. Within their own families, they are at the bottom of the pecking order, so they tend to identify more with the underdog and to champion egalitarian causes.
Younger siblings were the earliest backers of the Protestant Reformation, and after it the Enlightenment. Most lost causes in history have been supported by younger siblings and opposed by firstborns. This historical difference goes directly back to the kind of psychological differences in strategic niches that siblings occupy within the family constellation.
JB: You have stated that younger siblings have more in common with their peers than their siblings.
SULLOWAY: On average, firstborns are more similar in personality to firstborns in other families than they are to their own younger siblings. Similarly, a youngest child in one family is often more similar to a youngest child in another family than to his or her own elder siblings. Still, all laterborns are more similar to one another, on average, than they are to firstborns.
JB: How did you test this hypothesis?
SULLOWAY: There are several ways of testing it. In my book Born to Rebel, I engaged in two major empirical assaults on this problem.
The first method of attack involved historical evidence. I gathered data on more than 6,500 participants in major revolutions in science, politics, and social thought. In addition, I arranged for each individual's position in each controversy to be validated by half a dozen or more expert historians. Overall, I asked 110 historical experts to examine my lists of participants in revolutions, and to assess whether these lists were representative of participants as a whole. My experts were also asked to nominate missing individuals, and they rated every participant on a scale of acceptance and rejection. Obtaining these expert ratings involved a tremendous amount of work, in part because I did it in person. I flew a quarter of a million miles around the world as I gathered these expert ratings from scholars in England, France, Germany, Italy, and America.
My second line of research involved a reassessment of the birth-order literature as a whole. There are more than 2,000 publications on this subject, and what was needed was a meta-analysis to determine whether there are more significant findings than would be expected by chance.
In my meta-analysis I tested specific hypotheses about sibling strategies, using the Big Five personality dimensions as my guide.
That is, I expected firstborns—relative to laterborns—to be more:
(1) conscientious;
(2) aggressive;
(3) conventional;
(4) extraverted in the sense of being dominant (laterborns are more extraverted in the sense of being sociable), and;
(5) emotionally volatile, in the sense of being quicker to anger.
All five of these hypotheses were confirmed by my meta-analysis, which involved a statistical survey of 196 birth-order studies controlled for social class and sibship size.
JB: What about the only child?
SULLOWAY: Only children pose another interesting question. I view only children as the ideal controlled experiment. They are what it is like to have no birth-order effects at all: Only children have no siblings, hence they have no sibling rivalry. Two predictions follow from these circumstances. One is that only children ought to be intermediate on many personality traits. This follows because they are not being pushed by a younger sibling into being particularly conscientious or aggressive; and they are not being pushed by an elder sibling into being particularly daring or unconventional. Hence only children ought to be somewhere in the behavioral middle. And this is where they turn out to be.
Secondly, only children are free to occupy any niche they wish to in childhood—for example, they do not have to worry about who is going to move in to occupy a niche that they vacate. For this reason, they are free to roam around. As a result, they ought to be more variable than average in their personality traits and interests, and they are. Only children are the most unpredictable group. Their behavior is difficult to predict precisely because their childhood options are greater than for people who grow up with siblings.
Here's the argument in a nutshell.
SULLOWAY: Based on Darwinian theory, I argue that offspring are predisposed (genetically) to compete for parental investment. The role of the environment inevitably comes in because individuals—based on the contingencies of birth order, gender, and age spacing—tend to occupy different family niches. This part of the argument is not at all based on genetic determinism. There are no genes for being firstborn or genes for being laterborn. Siblings become very different in large part because different family environments—or niches, if you will—lead them to adopt differing strategies in their efforts to get out of childhood alive.
Because firstborns are bigger than their younger siblings, it is easier for them to employ aggressive and tough-minded tactics, which then become part of their personality. This part of the theory is very much an environmental and interactionist argument. My reasoning in Born to Rebel is like Pinker's argument inThe Language Instinct. There's undoubtedly a hard-wired capacity for humans to engage in verbal communication, a capacity that other apes do not possess. But the country we grow up in determines which language we learn to speak.
In the same way, we are hard-wired in a Darwinian sense to compete with our siblings for parental investment, but the particular aspects of each person's personality are the product of characteristics of the family environment in which one grows up, just as speaking German in one country, and French in another country, are appropriate linguistic differences produced by the same language instinct.
In short, my argument is not just about nature; nor is it just about nurture-it is a combined nature/nurture argument, in which much of the psychological details are clearly on the environmental side.
Image wandered from Vagabond Journey
Voltaire's Fathers' Gardener
SULLOWAY: A story proves nothing; it just demonstrates that people have been clever enough to find evidence to fit their hypotheses. The approach I took in Born to Rebel involved testing my hypotheses using large statistical samples, and then illustrating the various relationships I had documented by telling one or more stories that brought these relationships to life. For example, laterborns are more likely to challenge the status quo, and they are more likely to cause their parents aggravation by doing all sorts of outrageous things.
A person who exemplifies this tendency is Voltaire—he got his start as a poet when his family, to amuse themselves, had Voltaire and his elder brother Armand engage in poetry contests. The family soon discovered that Voltaire was a terror at satirical poetry—and he was probably aiming many of his scathing ditties at his elder brother, whom he didn't particularly like. The family put an end to these poetry contests. The father subsequently became concerned that his younger son would end up wasting his life in such an unfruitful profession as literature. "You will starve to death," he warned his son. But a poet had been born, and Voltaire became the richest literary figure in all of eighteenth-century Europe through the sales of his ribald poems, plays, and books. His brother Armand, by the way, became a religious fanatic. What is Voltaire most famous for? His scathing critiques of the Catholic church!
Here is another story about Voltaire that I cannot resist telling. Voltaire once witnessed his father having a vehement argument with his gardener. Voltaire's father was a stubborn man. He finally dismissed the gardener, saying to him, "I hope you find an employer who is as gracious and kind as I am." Voltaire thought this remark was ridiculous-that his father, one of the most irascible people he knew, would tell the employee he had just fired that he would be lucky to find another employer as even-tempered as himself.
Soon after, Voltaire went to see a play. It turned out that there was a scene in the play just like the Voltaire had witnessed between his father and the gardener. After the play was over, Voltaire went to see the playwright and asked him if he would substitute, in the next performance of the play, a few words that were closer to his father's own remarks. Voltaire then went home and invited his father to attend the play. His father accepted, and as the father sat through the play, there finally came the scene with the gardener.
Voltaire wrote of this episode that "My good father was rather mortified."
This story reflects the use of the satirical knife blade, and the turning it in his victim, that Voltaire did to his enemies throughout his career. Some noblemen became so outraged by Voltaire's satirical broadsides that they had him beaten, or arranged for him to have a nice long stay in the Bastille. In any event, these are the kinds of biographical stories that bring a figure like Voltaire alive; and they also illustrates the kinds of unconventional and irreverent qualities that younger siblings have displayed throughout history.
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