Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Josh and Chuck here to remind you that
Speaker 1: our last three shows of the year. Boy, this is
Speaker 1: a good show this year are taking place very soon
Speaker 1: and tickets are still available.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so get in the saddle and come out and
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Speaker 1: Just go to stuff youshould know dot com and click
Speaker 1: on the tour link and you can get all your
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Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast again, right Chuck.
Speaker 1: That's right, everybody. This was a very strange case, very
Speaker 1: rare in which we actually recorded an entire episode again
Speaker 1: that we had already recorded. It was my fault for
Speaker 1: picking it, but to be fair, nobody else noticed either.
Speaker 2: Nope, not at all.
Speaker 1: But we decided to release this anyway because we listened
Speaker 1: to the episodes and we thought it was kind of
Speaker 1: fun and it might be kind of like a live
Speaker 1: in Laura is a bit of a stuff you should
Speaker 1: know easter egg right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And we really wish we could say it
Speaker 2: was unique rather than just rare. But this is the
Speaker 2: second time we've done this. See our Black Holes episodes
Speaker 2: that's right. So here we go again, everybody with the
Speaker 2: Birth Order, Episode round two. We hope you like it.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
Speaker 2: there's Charles w Chuck Bryant and Jerry He's here. And
Speaker 2: you put the three of us together, you got pretty
Speaker 2: good zip ship going zipship?
Speaker 1: Is that a word?
Speaker 2: Oh, he didn't read that one thing I sent you.
Speaker 1: I did, but I didn't pick out that word.
Speaker 2: Yes, sibship it is the total siblings in a family.
Speaker 1: I love that, isn't that neat? Yeah?
Speaker 2: And you can have high sib ships That means your
Speaker 2: parents got it on a bunch of times without any protection.
Speaker 2: The second is the low sib ship, which means your
Speaker 2: parents were maybe be a little cold to one another.
Speaker 2: And then the third one the midsig sib ship, which
Speaker 2: I just made up, but I like.
Speaker 1: Threes or low means they they got it on a lot,
Speaker 1: but you know, used protection.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Or they're highly intelligent don't want to ruin the
Speaker 2: planet with extra people. It's another possible interpretation.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you won't hear about that one at all.
Speaker 2: No, definitely not. It's not me. I'm talking about the
Speaker 2: people who are into that kind of thinking other people.
Speaker 2: I can't remember there's a society for that, and I
Speaker 2: cannot oh the something first, it's like society for human extinction.
Speaker 2: They're like, we don't want to kill anybody alive, but
Speaker 2: we just want to stop reproducing because we're ruining the planet.
Speaker 2: I can't remember the name of them.
Speaker 1: I wonder if it's a named as an acronym that
Speaker 1: just spells.
Speaker 2: Ugh it spells die die die. Oh goodness, Well, Chuck,
Speaker 2: I'm excited about this one. This is a good pick
Speaker 2: from you, and it was a great assist from our
Speaker 2: friend Dave Ruse. And we're talking about birth order, and
Speaker 2: it's one of those things that like everybody knows birth order.
Speaker 2: I mean, it was even on the Brady bunch, like
Speaker 2: jan was clearly the middle child, yeah, the middle daughter
Speaker 2: at least, and really kind of bore that chip on
Speaker 2: her shoulder. Little Bobby Brady, he was the youngest, and
Speaker 2: he was often neglected as a result. He had to
Speaker 2: kind of make his own way and find out that
Speaker 2: he was really into pork shops and apple shawsh and
Speaker 2: so on and so forth right. So everybody knows about
Speaker 2: birth order. But it turns out I didn't realize this.
Speaker 2: It's had a long history of being presented scientifically and
Speaker 2: then refuted scientifically, and then we'll come back again, and
Speaker 2: then it's gone again, and then it's going to come
Speaker 2: back at you one more time. Kind of like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so we're going to go over those ups and downs.
Speaker 1: I'm sure we'll toss in our own opinions here and
Speaker 1: there that have no basis in sciences. Sure, because I
Speaker 1: have a as everyone knows, I'm the youngest I know.
Speaker 1: I have an older brother that's three years older. Yep, Scott.
Speaker 1: We've talked about a lot, so great, he's the best.
Speaker 1: And I have a sister that is six years older. Huh.
Speaker 1: She is the eldest. My sister Michelle, she's also great, yep.
Speaker 1: And so it's like, you know, three years apart, three
Speaker 1: years apart, nothing. Because I think some of this stuff
Speaker 1: can be sort of taken with a grain of salt,
Speaker 1: Like if you have, you know, the surprise baby that's
Speaker 1: you know, fourteen years younger than anyone else in your family,
Speaker 1: things might you know, be different. And then some people
Speaker 1: say it makes no difference at all about your eventual personality.
Speaker 1: But I guess to recap we should just go up
Speaker 1: over how it typically breaks down, which is, if you're
Speaker 1: the first born, then people will say, Oh, you're probably
Speaker 1: gonna be bossier. You're probably gonna be an overachiever, maybe
Speaker 1: a perfectionist, maybe a little neurotic. If you're the middle
Speaker 1: child or the second born, you're probably gonna be a
Speaker 1: peacemaker and a people pleaser. And then if you're the
Speaker 1: baby of the family, then you're just a little spoiled brat,
Speaker 1: but you're probably gonna be adventurous because you were left
Speaker 1: to your own devices and you answer to nobody, so
Speaker 1: you just go off and join the Peace Corps or something.
Speaker 2: Sure, then there's also only children, which are kind of
Speaker 2: their own thing.
Speaker 1: But they, yeah, we should do a whole thing on onlies.
Speaker 2: I think sure, they very much resemble of the other ones.
Speaker 2: They much more resemble the firstborn child. Yeah, but a
Speaker 2: weirder version of a firstborn. So the thing is is, like,
Speaker 2: all of this sounds totally true and obvious, but it
Speaker 2: just is not fully born out in the research. It's
Speaker 2: kind of Dave compares it to a horoscope where you
Speaker 2: can kind of see yourself or your siblings, and you know,
Speaker 2: any one of these things. It just kind of makes sense.
Speaker 2: And we have this selection bias and confirmation bias where
Speaker 2: we just pick out the stuff that agrees with us,
Speaker 2: and we ignore the points about say a middle child
Speaker 2: or a a firstborn child that don't quite fit. We
Speaker 2: just kind of discard that stuff. And because all of
Speaker 2: us have some form of family, typically we all have
Speaker 2: like anecdotal experience with that. And even if you don't
Speaker 2: have a family, you're probably a friend of somebody who
Speaker 2: has a family, so you've observed it yourself. So that
Speaker 2: means that it's just supported that much more through your
Speaker 2: own experience, which means it's been really hard to shake.
Speaker 1: That's right. And that horoscope thing, not to say Dave
Speaker 1: is not a free thinker, but a lot of people
Speaker 1: compare it to horoscopes. As it turns out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and another thing, you can call it his pop
Speaker 2: psychology for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So we should go back to the beginning, I guess,
Speaker 1: which is to say the nineteenth century. As far as
Speaker 1: the science on birth order goes to eighteen seventy four
Speaker 1: with someone named that we've talked about a few times
Speaker 1: on the show Francis Galton. I know that we talked
Speaker 1: about Galton on episodes where he talked about eugenics, but
Speaker 1: I'm sure other things have come up as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was a polymath, but he was well known
Speaker 2: for eugenics, genetics. He came up with fingerprinting catalogs like
Speaker 2: he did all sorts.
Speaker 1: Of stuff, that's right. So he was the half cousin
Speaker 1: of Charles Darwin, and he had a book called English
Speaker 1: Men of Science. Kind of sounds like Real Men of Genius.
Speaker 2: I was going to say it was adapted into a
Speaker 2: series of bud like commercials later.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what it seems like. Colon of course their
Speaker 1: Nature and Nurture in which he he basically was kind
Speaker 1: of keen to investigate the origin of genius. So what
Speaker 1: better place to go than to study the gentlemen of
Speaker 1: the Royal Society, Royal Society of London at the oldest
Speaker 1: scientific academy in the world. And he got ninety nine guys.
Speaker 1: It's very strange that he didn't get one hundred, but
Speaker 1: he didn't get one hundred, and he did a lot
Speaker 1: of research and got a lot of data on these gentlemen,
Speaker 1: including birth order stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but also mother's hair color. He measured their heads.
Speaker 2: He really went to town on these ninety nine englishmen
Speaker 2: of science. And what he found out when he kind
Speaker 2: of crunched all the data was that sixty one of
Speaker 2: the ninety nine members that he profiled of the Royal
Speaker 2: Society were among the oldest in their family. They were
Speaker 2: either only children, only sons I should say they were
Speaker 2: only or they were eldest sons, or if they were
Speaker 2: middle born, they were toward the top of the middle born,
Speaker 2: the earlier side of the middle born cohort. That's right,
Speaker 2: And if there was no effect on birth order and genius,
Speaker 2: then it should have been basically forty five and a
Speaker 2: half forty five and a half, right, and spare a
Speaker 2: thought for those poor half people.
Speaker 1: That's right. What about the other ten percent? Though?
Speaker 2: I think that's uh, that's jerry Okay, So wait wait, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're right, you're right. So no, no, yeah, forty did
Speaker 2: I say forty nine and a half or forty five.
Speaker 1: And a half? Well what do you think?
Speaker 2: Let me rephrase that and say forty nine and a half.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay, I got you, because you came up with
Speaker 1: ninety one I did, and yeah, so I got it
Speaker 1: wrong too. I said, what about the ten people? It
Speaker 1: was really nine people?
Speaker 2: Yeah, plus you said ten percent. So this whole thing
Speaker 2: was screwed up, right, just royally all right.
Speaker 1: So he concluded based on this, and this is a
Speaker 1: quote that I would I don't know if you take requests,
Speaker 1: but I would love for you to read this in
Speaker 1: the voice of Smigel.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's see. Do you remember I think I do so.
Speaker 1: I like to think Snegel lives in you in some
Speaker 1: way a little bit.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we said that, oh man, elder sons have
Speaker 2: on the whole decided advantages of nurture over the younger ones.
Speaker 2: They're treated more as companions by their parents and have
Speaker 2: earlier responsibility, both of which would develop independence of character
Speaker 2: and in less well to new families. The oldest child
Speaker 2: has the advantage of better nourishment in his infancy compared
Speaker 2: to the later board siblings.
Speaker 1: Pretty close. I feel like that was Smiegel's brother, Spiegel
Speaker 1: Spiegel not bad though.
Speaker 2: So how do you ever remember what Snigel sounds like?
Speaker 1: I listened to that every night. Okay, this might go
Speaker 1: to bed music.
Speaker 2: That makes sense.
Speaker 1: So if you were too uh, disadvantaged in being thrown
Speaker 1: off by Josh's hilarious reading. Just a quick recap basically is,
Speaker 1: if you're the oldest, then you have an advantage because
Speaker 1: you're like your parents' buddy. You got a lot more responsibility,
Speaker 1: so you're gonna be more independent.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: And then if you're a family that's maybe doesn't have
Speaker 1: as much money, then if you're the oldest and you're
Speaker 1: gonna you're gonna get the chicken on the table and
Speaker 1: not be fighting for that chicken like your little brothers
Speaker 1: and sisters will.
Speaker 2: Be, especially in infancy because you were the only one,
Speaker 2: so you got all the baby food.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this doesn't sound I mean, I know a lot
Speaker 1: of this poo poos the science, but this doesn't sound
Speaker 1: wildly unreasonable to me as a you know.
Speaker 2: No, it's echoed still today in our ideas of birth
Speaker 2: order and explaining it. Yeah. So that was Francis Galton.
Speaker 2: We'll leave him and I think probably until I guess
Speaker 2: about the Actually, not that far after I think he
Speaker 2: was speaking. He wrote in what the last quarter of
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century, right, So, I mean just less than
Speaker 2: fifty years later, a guy named Alfred Adler, who was
Speaker 2: a psychologist kind of picked that up and ran with it,
Speaker 2: not just entirely birth order, but birth order was a
Speaker 2: part of his larger theory called Adlerian psychology or individual psychology.
Speaker 2: And there were basically three founders of psychotherapy as we
Speaker 2: know it today. There was Adler, Freud and Jung. And
Speaker 2: Freud and Jung's ideas have been largely dismissed. Alfred Adler's
Speaker 2: ideas are basically the premise for how we approach psychology today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and he's a he's an interesting guy. He was
Speaker 1: a colleague of Freud, and I think through history it
Speaker 1: seems obvious that a lot of people have kind of
Speaker 1: said like he was an acolyte or Freud was his mentor,
Speaker 1: and he went through great pains over the years to
Speaker 1: say he called me first, Like he would go to
Speaker 1: reporters and say, look, here's a telegram where Freud got
Speaker 1: in touch with me and wanted to talk to me.
Speaker 2: Oh he was like that, huh.
Speaker 1: Well, I just think he had a little bit of
Speaker 1: a sort of maybe younger sibling syndrome, and that will
Speaker 1: you know, you'll see that kind of plays out a
Speaker 1: little bit in his own sibling dynamic. Yeah, his research.
Speaker 2: His older brother was named Sigmund two, so I just
Speaker 2: been freudiant he might have been.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they were together, he and Freud for about nine
Speaker 1: years studying, but then when they split apart, and some
Speaker 1: people say that it had a lot to do with
Speaker 1: this sibling dynamic and birth order thing. I think it
Speaker 1: was more complicated than that, definitely, But they never talked
Speaker 1: again after that. No, they were done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but Adler's ideas went on. It's definitely worth looking into.
Speaker 2: He basically says that the whole basis of our individual
Speaker 2: psychology comes out of our social interactions. We learn how
Speaker 2: to approach life in the world through our interactions early
Speaker 2: on with our family. That's he called that our lifestyle.
Speaker 2: There's a web of interactions between parents and kids and
Speaker 2: also among siblings he called the family constellation. And then
Speaker 2: he also said that like, basically the point of life
Speaker 2: was to be a good, contributing member of a society
Speaker 2: that is working toward positivity and equality. He was way
Speaker 2: ahead of his time, because this guy was writing one
Speaker 2: hundred years ago and now we're just starting to adopt
Speaker 2: his philosophies. Is like not just valid, Like that's the
Speaker 2: point of individual psychology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he has a good quote too, and again this
Speaker 1: seems very reasonable to me when he says, it is
Speaker 1: a common fallacy to imagine that children of the same
Speaker 1: family are formed in the same environment. Of course, there's
Speaker 1: much which is the same for all in the same home,
Speaker 1: but the psychic situation of each child is individual and
Speaker 1: differs from that of others because of the order of
Speaker 1: their succession.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he's basically saying something that like you said, a
Speaker 1: lot of people hang their hat on, which is like, hey,
Speaker 1: just because you grew up in the same house doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you grew up in the same house. You know
Speaker 1: what I mean.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And he gave an example of that that kind
Speaker 2: of really figured into his theory about birth order, which
Speaker 2: was to him another big driver personality that came out
Speaker 2: of the early experience in the family is that especially
Speaker 2: older and middle children, or actually I guess older and
Speaker 2: middle children only went through the trauma of being dethroned.
Speaker 2: They were, you know, at one point, if you were
Speaker 2: the firstborn, the only one, and then all of a
Speaker 2: sudden another one comes along and you're not the shining
Speaker 2: star of your parents' universe any longer. You have to
Speaker 2: share that with somebody, and he identified that as a
Speaker 2: trauma and that that alone would significantly contribute to a
Speaker 2: child's personality, and that was based on birth order.
Speaker 1: All right, boy, that's a great setup, I think. So
Speaker 1: let's take a break. Yes, yes, Smiel, what do you think? Yes, perfect,
Speaker 1: and we're going to come back and break down his
Speaker 1: thoughts on this whole dethroning of what that meant right
Speaker 1: after this shot shot. All right, So this isn't that
Speaker 1: much different as far as what birth order means, but
Speaker 1: it's a little more specific to his own findings and
Speaker 1: thoughts on the matter. So, if you're oldest, like you said,
Speaker 1: you're dethroned once there's a sibling below you, and when
Speaker 1: that happens, there's a chance you might become a problem
Speaker 1: because you're trying to get that attention again, you might
Speaker 1: act out. You will likely feel responsible for your younger
Speaker 1: siblings as if you're a parent, that can make you
Speaker 1: pretty neurotic. So that checks that box, and you really
Speaker 1: may act as a parent. You may kind of help
Speaker 1: raise the kids, especially back then when the parents are
Speaker 1: away or the parents are busy. You might be that
Speaker 1: parental authority in a lot of cases. So you may
Speaker 1: have a positive view of authority, and because of all
Speaker 1: of this stuff, you're probably gonna be pretty hard working,
Speaker 1: and that perfectionist thing comes in pretty conscientious.
Speaker 2: Yes, So that's the oldest, right, that's right next to
Speaker 2: second born. If there's two, there's just two kids, this
Speaker 2: applies to them. They are constantly keeping up or trying
Speaker 2: to compete with the older sibling. So life is a
Speaker 2: little bit exhausting. And this is something that Adler himself
Speaker 2: went through with his older brother Sigmund he as he
Speaker 2: kind of identified the older sibling then having more of
Speaker 2: an influence in some cases than the actual parents do
Speaker 2: on the child's development. Which makes a lot of sense too,
Speaker 2: because that older child is being a mini parent to
Speaker 2: the second child. Right If they if the kids finding
Speaker 2: like they're just constantly are being beat by the by
Speaker 2: the older sibling, who doesn't even seem to be aware
Speaker 2: that they're in a competition, they're still winning, they might
Speaker 2: just go off in a totally different direction and whatever
Speaker 2: they've identified the older sibling to be, like Alex P.
Speaker 2: Keaton young Republican type, they're going to go the exact
Speaker 2: opposite way and start following the grateful.
Speaker 1: Dead like Tinay others did exactly.
Speaker 2: Man that name, it doesn't matter Tena others. It's the
Speaker 2: ultimate name. It was. There's Mallory, Alex and.
Speaker 1: Others.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if they didn't use Tenay others, I think that
Speaker 2: was a big miss that the writers walk.
Speaker 1: Past, I know, and that should They should only have
Speaker 1: called her by teen the others, not Peter right exactly.
Speaker 2: And then like in the credits, it says tiny others
Speaker 2: as Tina others.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as herself. So we mentioned earlier I think I
Speaker 1: did about Adler's own situation at home, and it turns out,
Speaker 1: beyond Freud, he had an actual older brother, like you said,
Speaker 1: whose name was Sigmund, and he sort of had issues
Speaker 1: with it. He always was trying to live up to
Speaker 1: this older brother. Sigmund right complained about it a lot.
Speaker 1: It seemed like I think there was a biographer when
Speaker 1: he was a little bit older where he said, my
Speaker 1: eldest brother, he was always ahead of me. He's still
Speaker 1: ahead of me.
Speaker 2: Which is true. He's never going to catch up to
Speaker 2: his eldest brother, at least in birth order.
Speaker 1: Well, that's right.
Speaker 2: He also had two younger brothers. One adored Adler kind
Speaker 2: of bucked the trend. The other one felt competitive with Adler,
Speaker 2: so he was in the position that Adler was with Sigmund. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the middle child. So say you're having your parents are
Speaker 2: just hitting it fast and loose, and they're having more
Speaker 2: and more children. The middle children are going to have
Speaker 2: their own kind of baggage to carry around. They're frequently
Speaker 2: they frequently feel forgotten, ignored, neglected, jam bradyish. They may be.
Speaker 2: They may decide that life is extraordinarily unfair, that they're invisible,
Speaker 2: and that might really make them neurotic in their own way.
Speaker 2: And then this really makes a lot of sense to
Speaker 2: me too. They may find that family constellation that Adler
Speaker 2: said was so important in your development and in your
Speaker 2: youth elsewhere outside of the family, they're the kid that
Speaker 2: goes off and is like, yeah, whatever, you guys have
Speaker 2: your fun little you know, family barbecue. I'm going to
Speaker 2: go hang out at my friend's house instead. I like
Speaker 2: their family more.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is interesting because I think that flies in
Speaker 1: the face a little bit of the typical middle child
Speaker 1: thing of being a people pleaser and a uni Uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's funny because I think of the younger child
Speaker 2: as a people pleaser.
Speaker 1: Oh really, because that's usually the middle child thing.
Speaker 2: This is the thing, this is where it exactly fall apart.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Well, because also in my family, like you know,
Speaker 1: my sister, she did fine in school, I did fine
Speaker 1: in school, but my brother was like right in the middle,
Speaker 1: and he was the he's the really smart guy. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he set the bar as number two. But I
Speaker 1: also felt like I never felt like I had to
Speaker 1: live up to that.
Speaker 2: Oh that's good, that's healthy and lucky.
Speaker 1: Lucky because I didn't strive to. I wasn't like, no,
Speaker 1: I can't be as smart as Scott, so I'll just
Speaker 1: do my own thing. I just didn't really think about it.
Speaker 1: And my parents, well I was about to say they
Speaker 1: didn't put that kind of pressure on me, but they
Speaker 1: just there was not a lot of attension on me
Speaker 1: by the time I came around.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you was your own thing, right, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So well, here we are then, at the youngest, I'm
Speaker 1: talking about myself pampered and spoiled, which I was not,
Speaker 1: because less is expected. Like we mentioned earlier, you're probably
Speaker 1: going to be a little more adventurous. I definitely was
Speaker 1: more adventurous and as sort of the black cheap in
Speaker 1: my family, but I don't think it was because less
Speaker 1: it's expected of me. And then, you know, Adler at
Speaker 1: the end talks about how the successful men of our
Speaker 1: time and I think of all times oftentimes were the youngest,
Speaker 1: and he mentions like people in the Bible, and he
Speaker 1: even mentions, this is where he lose me a little bit.
Speaker 1: I mentioned fairy tales and I'm like, so the people
Speaker 1: in these made up stories, the youngest were more successful.
Speaker 1: So that means something to science.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's where I actually wrote careful Adler after that,
Speaker 2: because it's he got you know, he had some really
Speaker 2: great theories. And then one of the big problems of
Speaker 2: early twentieth century psychologists is they just look out in
Speaker 2: places that didn't really apply and use them as proof.
Speaker 2: And that's a good example of that, because his theories
Speaker 2: are very sound and they make a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: They're well thought out. It's just you don't run out
Speaker 2: to the Bible to your point. It doesn't that's not
Speaker 2: how science works typically.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look at King David exactly.
Speaker 2: And then we're at only Children, which okay, we'll do
Speaker 2: a whole episode on them, but they have they have
Speaker 2: the advantage of being the sole recipient of their parents'
Speaker 2: attention and focus and love and adoration, just like a
Speaker 2: first board child. But they never go through the trauma
Speaker 2: of being dethroned, so they are basically little kings and
Speaker 2: queens who.
Speaker 1: Run the show on top.
Speaker 2: Essentially.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, a king who's not dethroned. He's a king exactly.
Speaker 2: That's true. And Adler wrote that they retain the center
Speaker 2: of the stage without effort. They're generally pampered, and they
Speaker 2: form a style of life based on being supported by
Speaker 2: others and at the same time ruling them.
Speaker 1: Great combination, Yeah, totally. Hodgman talks a lot about being
Speaker 1: an only child. It's very funny to hear him muse
Speaker 1: on the stuff. All right, So these theories were out
Speaker 1: there in the nineteen twenties basically through for about sixty
Speaker 1: something years, it was sort of just commonly accepted that
Speaker 1: this was the case. They had done studies it backed
Speaker 1: up a lot of this, and then a funny thing
Speaker 1: happened in the nineteen eighties. In fact, in nineteen eighty three,
Speaker 1: there were a couple of Swiss psychologists, Jules Angst and
Speaker 1: Cecil Ernst, and they said, you know what, this is
Speaker 1: all poo poo, and we're going to write our own
Speaker 1: book called Birth Order Colon. It's poopoo. Actually it's birth
Speaker 1: order its influence on personality. And they went back looked
Speaker 1: at all these studies, like fifteen hundred studies from the
Speaker 1: mid forties to nineteen eighty. A lot of these studies
Speaker 1: had backed up Adler's theories and stuff like this. But
Speaker 1: they said, you know what, the closer we looked, the
Speaker 1: more we picked this apart. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: fallacies in here. There are a lot of methodological pitfalls.
Speaker 1: And basically I think that there is like birth order
Speaker 1: effect really doesn't have anything to do with personality at
Speaker 1: least no much more than anything else that we could
Speaker 1: kind of find out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they definitely poo pooted it. One of the examples
Speaker 2: they gave was that there was a meta analysis of
Speaker 2: previous previous studies of birth order findings, which means that
Speaker 2: it's a they compile a bunch of findings from a
Speaker 2: bunch of different studies and apply statistical analysis of it.
Speaker 2: They turned these smaller sample sizes into one large sample size,
Speaker 2: and of course it found a positive correlation between the
Speaker 2: birth order and personality traits. But those particular researchers said, well,
Speaker 2: we didn't actually include any studies that didn't find a
Speaker 2: positive correlation between birth order and personality traits. We only
Speaker 2: studied ones that did show that. That's like does some
Speaker 2: junk science right there. And that's the kind of thing
Speaker 2: that Angst and Ernst were saying, like, this is the
Speaker 2: quality of the studies heretofore and when you really look
Speaker 2: at the methodology and all the like their findings, like
Speaker 2: it just does not add up that you can't replicate them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they in fact it they had a pretty sick burn.
Speaker 1: They called it post hoc theory, which is basically like
Speaker 1: you can go into these studies and you can find
Speaker 1: whatever you're looking for if you kind of just pick
Speaker 1: apart different parts of it and cherry picked different parts
Speaker 1: of it. And they use one good example they use
Speaker 1: was anxiety and which children in a family had the
Speaker 1: highest anxiety levels and reported those levels. And they said,
Speaker 1: you know, if you look if you're Adler or others,
Speaker 1: you have an explanation for all of them. So if
Speaker 1: it's the youngest, it's because you're the weakest sibling. Which
Speaker 1: is that true?
Speaker 2: I think they mean physically, your older siblings are generally
Speaker 2: bigger and stronger than you.
Speaker 1: Is that true?
Speaker 2: Typically? Sure? I mean you compare like a tripy four
Speaker 2: year old to a ten year old. Ten year old
Speaker 2: beat up on the four year old any day of
Speaker 2: the week.
Speaker 1: Well, we'll get to the snapshot in time thing. Because
Speaker 1: I thought they meant overall, like I grew up to
Speaker 1: be the smallest and weakest.
Speaker 2: No, but yeah, you just touched on a huge problem
Speaker 2: that we'll get you there.
Speaker 1: Don't No, I didn't NeSSI put it in it in
Speaker 1: my brain. If the oldest of the family reported being
Speaker 1: the most anxious, then they said, oh, well, it's because
Speaker 1: they had an experienced mother, and if it was the
Speaker 1: middle it was because they were neglected. So they're like,
Speaker 1: you can't do that.
Speaker 2: That's not science, right exactly, And they pretty much definitively
Speaker 2: removed birth order influencing personality as a field of psychology
Speaker 2: like psychology turned its back on that, and that was
Speaker 2: it for a dozen years essentially, maybe a little more.
Speaker 2: But before their book, or Angston Ernst's book came out
Speaker 2: back in the seventy I think actually nineteen seventy, there
Speaker 2: was a psychologist named Frank Solaway. He was working on
Speaker 2: his doctorate think at the time, and he had a
Speaker 2: professor that that was into birth order as this is
Speaker 2: again this is before the Swiss study of the Swiss
Speaker 2: book came out and made Swiss cheese a birth order.
Speaker 2: And the Soloway's professor said, you know what, Charles Darwin,
Speaker 2: let's just talk about Darwin for a second. He said,
Speaker 2: sit down, Soilhaway, sit down, I've been wanting to talk
Speaker 2: to you about this. Charles Darwin came up with one
Speaker 2: of the most radical theories that science has ever produced
Speaker 2: in coming up with natural selection and evolution. Right, But
Speaker 2: did you know that Darwin's mentor the person that had
Speaker 2: the greatest influence on his work his entire career, a
Speaker 2: geologist named Charles Lyle, did not accept that that we
Speaker 2: have all from apes. Did not accept natural selection. He
Speaker 2: could not accept it. And in fact, Lyle was in
Speaker 2: quite a quite a pickle because he prized science and
Speaker 2: reason and his protoce had just used science and reason
Speaker 2: to show that humans are no different than animals, and
Speaker 2: Lyle was like, no, reason is what separates us from animals.
Speaker 2: So he had a really hard time accepting that, and
Speaker 2: so Sos College professor pointed to Darwin being a later
Speaker 2: born and having a much more ability to think freely
Speaker 2: and Lyle being a firstborn and thinking much more conservatively
Speaker 2: as the explanation to that very famous gulf between the two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is a stretch for me, even though I
Speaker 1: think there's a lot to birth order. That one is,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's a stretch. But Soloway it was like, interesting,
Speaker 1: let me look into this a little more. I want
Speaker 1: to see if this is a reasonable assumption or theory
Speaker 1: at least. And he ended up writing a book in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six called Born to Rebel colon Birth Order,
Speaker 1: Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, and he did his own
Speaker 1: meta analysis of all of these studies that are out there,
Speaker 1: and he basically went on to poo poo Oxton Ernst
Speaker 1: and said Adler was right all along. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of significance to birth order and how it ties to
Speaker 1: your personality. And here's why I think this is true
Speaker 1: because a child occupies a niche in a family, and
Speaker 1: that niche is determined according to your birth order. So
Speaker 1: we're calling a birth order, but what it really is
Speaker 1: is a proxy for what The real things are behind this,
Speaker 1: which is how big you are, what's your status in
Speaker 1: that family, what is your power dynamic in that family,
Speaker 1: what's the age difference and stuff.
Speaker 2: Like that, right, and that those are the things that
Speaker 2: really influence your personality. But they all are, at the
Speaker 2: end of the day, tied into birth order. It's just
Speaker 2: not birth order in and of itself, but the qualities
Speaker 2: that come with birth order.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, which seems like splitting hairs, but maybe no
Speaker 1: one had split that hair yet.
Speaker 2: I mean, it makes sense to me. It definitely removes
Speaker 2: it from any kind of like astrological stuff, because birth
Speaker 2: order if you're like, yeah, you're a middle child, so
Speaker 2: you're all these things, not oh yeah you're smaller than
Speaker 2: your older brother, so you have a you don't like
Speaker 2: being touched kind of thing. I don't know. It makes sense.
Speaker 2: It takes it and actually provides an explanation to it.
Speaker 2: And by the way, I just want to point out,
Speaker 2: get this, chuck. So he started this research in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 2: release the book in nineteen ninety six, right smack dab
Speaker 2: in the middle of that twenty five ish years of research,
Speaker 2: that Swiss book came out. Can You imagine dedicating thirteen
Speaker 2: years of research and then all of a sudden some
Speaker 2: book comes along and completely disproves everything you've been working on.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But Frank's al always was the kind of be like, Nope,
Speaker 2: they're wrong, I'm right, I'm going to keep going.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And for him, family dynamics all came down to
Speaker 1: a Darwinian power struggle basically between these siblings for affection
Speaker 1: from their parents. So again, if you're first born, you're
Speaker 1: gonna basically act as a surrogate parent to your younger siblings.
Speaker 1: Not because you have some great desire to teach those kids,
Speaker 1: but you're looking at mom and dad and saying, like,
Speaker 1: see how much I'm helping, Like I'm helping be like
Speaker 1: little mommy or little Daddy. It's why they respect authority,
Speaker 1: it's why they're conscientious, and it's why they identify more
Speaker 1: with parents. The younger kids they and again this says
Speaker 1: lacks of physical strength. I guess presumably just because they're
Speaker 1: younger in that snapshot in time, which we'll get to
Speaker 1: don't spoil in, Chuck, but they have what he called
Speaker 1: low power strategies. So still had strategies as far as
Speaker 1: this power struggle, in the family, but more like, hey,
Speaker 1: let me use humor or social intelligence to get their
Speaker 1: affection instead of you know, like physical things.
Speaker 2: They were the kids that were more likely to spend
Speaker 2: their allowance on a bow tie that spins.
Speaker 1: Do you ever have one of those?
Speaker 2: No? I never did. I added like a little clip
Speaker 2: on bow tie for Easter if I remember correctly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a thing. I know a couple of bow
Speaker 1: tie guys.
Speaker 2: I learned how to tie a bow tie for mine
Speaker 2: and Yumi's wedding.
Speaker 1: Actually, so you were one then yes? Are you like, nah,
Speaker 1: just practice? Yeah. I can't pull off a bow tie.
Speaker 1: It's not a good look for me.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'd like to see that. Let me be
Speaker 2: the judge of that. Okay, all right, okay, well you
Speaker 2: tie it for me. I yes, I will. I know
Speaker 2: how to. I'm a little rusty, but I can get
Speaker 2: it back.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, you got to stand behind me and
Speaker 1: wrap your arms around me and do it that way.
Speaker 1: Of course, if you do it in front, it's like
Speaker 1: it's weird.
Speaker 2: And then afterwards we'll do that funny thing where it
Speaker 2: looks like you have four arms and I'm hiding behind you,
Speaker 2: and we'll do all sorts of weird stuff.
Speaker 1: And then after that, I'll get behind you and teach
Speaker 1: you how to swing a golf club.
Speaker 2: Okay, fair enough, it's all in the.
Speaker 1: Hips, all right. So from that power dynamic to wrap
Speaker 1: it up and that power struggle, we also have the
Speaker 1: middle children. And these are the ones again because you're
Speaker 1: in the middle, you're more likely to cooperate, you're more
Speaker 1: into diplomacy, and you're probably mediating fights between the oldest
Speaker 1: and the youngest, which did not track in my family.
Speaker 1: My sister and my brother and I didn't fight a lot,
Speaker 1: but if there was sibling fighting going on, it was
Speaker 1: usually me and my brother because we were closer in age.
Speaker 1: My sister was six when I was born, so I
Speaker 1: was her little baby boy, and so she and I
Speaker 1: never had a lot of fights and stuff, gotcha.
Speaker 2: So one of the other things that Soulo we spent
Speaker 2: his time on was he basically did the same thing
Speaker 2: Francis Galton did. He profiled a bunch of different people
Speaker 2: to kind of support his point. I read that he
Speaker 2: he basically created a database of sixty five hundred and
Speaker 2: sixty six historical people who were meaning they were all dead,
Speaker 2: who were involved in one hundred and twenty one different
Speaker 2: political and scientific upheavals from the scientific or sorry, from
Speaker 2: the French Revolution, Protestant Reformation, Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Speaker 2: And then he looked at a bunch of different factors,
Speaker 2: but one of those factors was birth order. And what
Speaker 2: he found was I saw an interview with him. He
Speaker 2: said that, yeah, there's a bunch of different stuff that
Speaker 2: influence our personality, our behavior. I think he controlled for
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty six different ones like age, religion, class, education,
Speaker 2: and he said, yes, some of those things influence our personality,
Speaker 2: but he said nothing packs the wallop of birth order.
Speaker 2: He basically said, it's birth order everybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And.
Speaker 2: He gave some examples.
Speaker 1: Right, well, yeah, I mean if you look if he
Speaker 1: did sort of the same thing that others have done,
Speaker 1: which is to point at famous people in history and say, well, see,
Speaker 1: look at this person. They were the first born and
Speaker 1: they did this. Look at King David, right, look at
Speaker 1: King David. In this case, he said, look at Mussolini
Speaker 1: and look at Stalin. I believe Stalin was not the firstborn,
Speaker 1: but his siblings died in infancy, so he was sort
Speaker 1: of de facto firstborn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they call it the psychological firstborn. That's the emphasis
Speaker 2: they put on it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So he said, look at these people, they were
Speaker 1: firstborns and they were monsters. And look at Marx and
Speaker 1: Darwin and Gandhi and they were all later borns. And
Speaker 1: you know, when you start breaking it down, though, and
Speaker 1: you say, oh, what about like Isaac Newton or Einstein?
Speaker 1: That goes against your idea because both of those guys
Speaker 1: were firstborns, and it went against the common thinking that
Speaker 1: the later borns were going to be the ones to
Speaker 1: come up with these revolutionary thoughts.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And he said, oh yeah, but you know what, the
Speaker 1: people that supported them were two to ten times more
Speaker 1: likely to be later born's.
Speaker 2: Right. So he did the opposite in those two cases
Speaker 2: when he pointed to something like he said, Lincoln was
Speaker 2: a second child and he had the revolutionary thinking of
Speaker 2: ending slavery. Yeah, and that's an example of basically being reductivist,
Speaker 2: Like he boiled down these huge historical machinations down to
Speaker 2: one individual to point to prove his point. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Lincoln and in slavery and he was a second born.
Speaker 2: And then he does the opposite with examples that don't
Speaker 2: fit like you said. Einstein and Newton, well they were
Speaker 2: first born, but their supporters were two to ten times
Speaker 2: more likely to be later born. So now he takes
Speaker 2: it from the individual and boils it back out to
Speaker 2: a bunch of different people having to do with these
Speaker 2: revolutions and thinking. It's pretty emblematic from what I've read
Speaker 2: of his argument.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I love Dave rus who put this together.
Speaker 1: He inserts little jokes here and there just for us,
Speaker 1: but sometimes we like to bring them out on the show.
Speaker 1: He wrote that ten times more likely and then put whatever,
Speaker 1: pal right, it's good stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Born to Rebel was a rebel. I've been
Speaker 2: wanting to say that the whole time. Okay, it should
Speaker 2: be elll e really if you think about it. But okay,
Speaker 2: so it became, I think when a bestseller. It was
Speaker 2: a really popular book despite being pretty scientific. I think
Speaker 2: half of it was scientific annotations and bibliography. But I
Speaker 2: believe he wrote it in like a way that you know,
Speaker 2: the average person could could digest, and it really made
Speaker 2: waves because again he comes along thirteen years after psychology
Speaker 2: was like, okay, great, that's done. Birth order has nothing
Speaker 2: to do with anything. He said, Nope, it's the most
Speaker 2: important driver of personality everybody. So he was widely criticized
Speaker 2: for it, including by another controversial thinker in psychology, Judith
Speaker 2: rich Harris. And she was controversial, like I said, because
Speaker 2: she was kind of tangential to the field. She was
Speaker 2: kicked out of Harvard during while she was working on
Speaker 2: her doctorate, and later on was awarded with a prestigious
Speaker 2: award that was named after the director of the psychology
Speaker 2: department who kicked her out, So she came full circle.
Speaker 2: But she was kind of considered like an outside thinker.
Speaker 2: But her whole jam was actually parents have like the
Speaker 2: least influence on kids' genes and peers that really shape
Speaker 2: people's individual personalities. And she basically said, no, Soloway is
Speaker 2: just totally full of it and this doesn't hold water
Speaker 2: at all.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and she had her own sick burns. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: I think was sicker than the earliest sickburn she said.
Speaker 1: Quote it is never surprising when the originator of a
Speaker 1: theory produces evidence that supports the theory. The real test
Speaker 1: of the theory is whether other people, working independently of
Speaker 1: the originator of the theory produce evidence that supports it
Speaker 1: pretty good burn.
Speaker 2: It is a great burn. So I say we take
Speaker 2: our second break, because that basically puts sol Away away
Speaker 2: for now. This is ninety six, and he got shouted
Speaker 2: down typically, but his work definitely brought it back into
Speaker 2: the popular mainstream, which is why still today you see
Speaker 2: like parenting sites and psychology sites like referring to the
Speaker 2: stuff as if it's true and real. So but yeah,
Speaker 2: I say we move on, and we use an ad
Speaker 2: break as a transition for that.
Speaker 1: Let's do it and shot shot.
Speaker 2: Okay, So slow Away really roughle a lot of feathers,
Speaker 2: And it took another decade or two before people finally
Speaker 2: like got around to conducting about as legitimate a meta
Speaker 2: analysis of the previous studies that you could possibly do,
Speaker 2: or they compiled their own studies based on really large
Speaker 2: sample sizes. Because if birth order is a thing, and
Speaker 2: birth order applies to everybody, including only children, then if
Speaker 2: you get a bunch of people together, birth order is
Speaker 2: going to show up in some way, shape or form,
Speaker 2: because it's there among everybody. It's not like some people
Speaker 2: have some sort of birth order. Everybody who's ever born
Speaker 2: has some sort of ranking, even only children. And yet
Speaker 2: when you look at really good data using really good methodology,
Speaker 2: it just does not come to the surface.
Speaker 1: That's right. This one was very large in twenty fifteen.
Speaker 1: It looked at data from three hundred and seventy seven
Speaker 1: thousand high school students in the United States. Then there
Speaker 1: was another study in the same year that analyzed data
Speaker 1: from about twenty thousand students in Europe and Germany in
Speaker 1: the US as well and UK. And there were a
Speaker 1: couple of psychologists, Rodika Damien and Brent W. Roberts from
Speaker 1: the Fighting Aliini of the University of Illinois. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure what an Aliini is.
Speaker 2: It's an Illinoianite, is it all right?
Speaker 1: And that sounds about right? Okay, But they fight, I
Speaker 1: know that, right, They're always fun. But they they isolated
Speaker 1: that they tried to do, you know, controls for everything
Speaker 1: as well, and they looked at everything, which included of course,
Speaker 1: birth order and then you know, the sex of the
Speaker 1: of the kid, and the number of siblings, size, socio
Speaker 1: economics of it all, and all this stuff. And they
Speaker 1: basically said, this is the largest study that we've ever done,
Speaker 1: the most sophisticated of its kind, and there is little
Speaker 1: to no functional relation between birth order and personality like
Speaker 1: full stop.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, full stop is right. And those same psychologists,
Speaker 2: Damien and Roberts, they wrote something they wrote basically like
Speaker 2: an editorial in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
Speaker 2: which also published their study of the three hundred and
Speaker 2: seventy seven thousand high school students. That is such a
Speaker 2: huge sample size, and they basically said in this editorial letter,
Speaker 2: here are all the problems from the previous study. There's
Speaker 2: just flaws galore. And they basically divided the types of
Speaker 2: studies for examining birth order into two different categories. There
Speaker 2: was the between family study design and the within family
Speaker 2: study design. And the between family study design said it
Speaker 2: just looked at a bunch of people who weren't related
Speaker 2: and then pulled them about their birth order and then
Speaker 2: looked at their individual personality traits. Within family design looked
Speaker 2: at the actual members of a single family or multiple
Speaker 2: single families, and then examined the personality traits based on
Speaker 2: their birth order in relation to the other members of
Speaker 2: their family, their sibship.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it seemed to hold a lot more water
Speaker 1: when you just looked at the family designs within a
Speaker 1: family and not between a bunch of these different families.
Speaker 1: Like this is when it started to make sense a
Speaker 1: little more for me. But at the same time, like,
Speaker 1: I don't feel it's too horoscopy to see that there's
Speaker 1: a lot of correlation between some of these traits, right,
Speaker 1: but the science doesn't hold up then it's just anecdotal basically.
Speaker 2: Well, what they were saying was so like, if you're
Speaker 2: looking at a between family design, you're not taking into
Speaker 2: account typically the number of siblings total. You're just taking
Speaker 2: account the birth order. And that they're saying that if
Speaker 2: you look at something like the number of firstborns versus
Speaker 2: later borns, there's more later borns than firstborn so there's
Speaker 2: only one firstborn in a family, but there can be
Speaker 2: multiple later borns, right, And that firstborns typically are smarter,
Speaker 2: they have a higher IQ. That will get to in
Speaker 2: a second is actually true, and that a lot of
Speaker 2: it has to do with them coming from families of
Speaker 2: high socioeconomic status, and that that's not controlled for. If
Speaker 2: you don't control for the SIB ship size, then your
Speaker 2: methodology is just crud. That was just one of multiple
Speaker 2: problems they had with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you're the what if you're from a
Speaker 1: large Catholic family of like eight kids and you're seven,
Speaker 1: six eight or five of eight, Like, does all this
Speaker 1: stuff just go out the door at that point?
Speaker 2: If birth order is is true, then no, it wouldn't
Speaker 2: like there you would have multiples in the middle, like
Speaker 2: sharing similar traits. I would guess, right, But that's not
Speaker 2: the case. And then they did another little victory lap
Speaker 2: and they basically said, oh, there's a couple of other
Speaker 2: things that are sacred cows in the field of birth
Speaker 2: order and personality. One is that it's it's it differs
Speaker 2: by gender, that birth order personality traits show up way
Speaker 2: more in males than females. And they were like, no,
Speaker 2: that's not true at all. We study that as part
Speaker 2: of this meta analysis. Nope, it's not correct. The other
Speaker 2: one is that, okay, birth order really starts to get
Speaker 2: diluted when you look at the full range of siblings
Speaker 2: in a family, especially if there's you know, a decade
Speaker 2: or more in between the oldest and the youngest, because
Speaker 2: really birth order only shows up between siblings that are
Speaker 2: separated by no more than five years. So it gets
Speaker 2: I louted if you'l like at the whole thing, and
Speaker 2: they said, nope, we shrunk everything down to just five
Speaker 2: year gaps between siblings tops, and it still did not
Speaker 2: show up. So they just absolutely trounced down the theory
Speaker 2: in every single way they could, using the best data
Speaker 2: in the best methodology, and they said, guys, it just
Speaker 2: it's not real. Can we please stop talking about this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and someone else is going to come along because
Speaker 1: people can't stop talking about and researching berth On.
Speaker 2: It's true, Yeah, if we look for it.
Speaker 1: It really is. Because as I was doing this, I
Speaker 1: was sort of into thinking about if I felt this
Speaker 1: is true or not, or what about my family? And
Speaker 1: then I was like, who cares? H And that's I
Speaker 1: guess why. It's pop psychology to a certain degree. I mean,
Speaker 1: these findings are sort of interesting, I guess, But what's
Speaker 1: the end game as far as what are we really learning,
Speaker 1: as far as like what makes it us better families
Speaker 1: or better as a as a human race? Like probably nothing.
Speaker 2: Well to me, it's an example of that that trait
Speaker 2: of twentieth century science that's like a compulsion to find
Speaker 2: the one reason that something happens, and this is a
Speaker 2: great example of that. But it's also again I think
Speaker 2: it's because we're all like confronted one way or another
Speaker 2: with birth order and made our own observation. So it's
Speaker 2: it's just kind of almost a folk psychology, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. So we were going to talk about
Speaker 1: IQ because it is true that when you look at
Speaker 1: the data in the numbers that firstborn's score highest on
Speaker 1: IQ tests. It's not a lot. What I found was
Speaker 1: like a point, so it's not some huge difference on average.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's not a shameful difference.
Speaker 1: It's not a shameful difference, but it was there, and
Speaker 1: there's a guide that has a really interesting take on
Speaker 1: all this. As his name was James, I don't know
Speaker 1: how you would say it. Junk is the only way
Speaker 1: I can say it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what people call him in the bars, probably.
Speaker 1: Z A j O N c ze yunk oh XEONK.
Speaker 2: I'm going with James ze yunk, right, and the whole
Speaker 2: the whole name flows like teeny others. James Zyunk is.
Speaker 1: The youngster yea. So uh he he looked at SAT scores.
Speaker 1: I found this pretty interesting. Actually, he started in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, when there was a big drop in verbal
Speaker 1: SAT scores that went on for about ten years, and
Speaker 1: of course people at the time were saying, oh, it's
Speaker 1: because of this, it's because of that, it's because these children.
Speaker 1: These days, our society is just going down the drain.
Speaker 1: People are getting dumber. But later than that, about ten
Speaker 1: years later, in seventy six, he said, here's what I predict.
Speaker 1: SAT scores are going to continue to go down for
Speaker 1: about four more years, and then in nineteen eighty they're
Speaker 1: going to start to go up again. And this is why, everybody,
Speaker 1: because there was a baby boom in our and there
Speaker 1: were a lot of firstborn children because of that baby
Speaker 1: boom that were born in nineteen forty nine, so that
Speaker 1: means they would be taking the SAT in about nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven. That's when scores peaked because firstborns, as we
Speaker 1: all know, are smarter. And then as each successive child
Speaker 1: is born from sixty seven on, they're not going to
Speaker 1: be as smart, and so these SAT scores are going
Speaker 1: to go down. But once we hit nineteen eighty, at
Speaker 1: all resets, because that baby boom stopped in sixty two,
Speaker 1: and if you were born in sixty two, you're going
Speaker 1: to take the SAT in nineteen eighty, So these scores
Speaker 1: are going to go back up, and they did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because between nineteen forty nine and nineteen sixty two
Speaker 2: there was it was much likelier that you were a
Speaker 2: second born than a first born compared to the beginning
Speaker 2: of the baby boom. So he basically just dropped the
Speaker 2: mic right there because it turned out that that's exactly
Speaker 2: what happened, Like his prediction came true. And what he
Speaker 2: showed was like, yep, birth order has to do with IQ.
Speaker 2: It's just as simple as that. It was later followed
Speaker 2: up or supported by a study from the Netherlands of
Speaker 2: four hundred thousand military recruits. They found the same thing
Speaker 2: with IQ score. And remember the SAT test used to
Speaker 2: test your IQ. And so what did I come up with? Zionk? Yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: James Zionk. He had a pretty neat theory or an
Speaker 2: explanation or hypothesis of why that would be true. And
Speaker 2: he said that it was based on what we talked
Speaker 2: about earlier, that if you're an older sibling, even like
Speaker 2: a second born sibling, as long as you're not the baby,
Speaker 2: you have the ability or you have the opportunity I
Speaker 2: mean to teach somebody else and to teach stuff. You
Speaker 2: have to know stuff. You have to be paying attention,
Speaker 2: you have to be aware, you have to be absorbing information,
Speaker 2: and that you have less and less of an opportunity
Speaker 2: to teach as more and more kids are born, because
Speaker 2: you're sharing that function with other second or later born kids,
Speaker 2: and then if you're the baby, you have no opportunity
Speaker 2: to teach. So you're just the dumbest of the bunch essentially,
Speaker 2: at least as far as Xiank's theory went, and again
Speaker 2: it's backed up by SAT and IQ scores. But thankfully
Speaker 2: you're saying that it's not that ridiculous of a difference
Speaker 2: between firstborn and last born.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that teaching function carries a little weight.
Speaker 2: Definitely, it makes sense at least.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes sense. A lot of this makes it.
Speaker 2: But if there was any warning from this entire episode,
Speaker 2: it's that just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's correct.
Speaker 1: Exactly, because we mentioned this a few times, put that
Speaker 1: pin in it, We're going to take that pin out
Speaker 1: because a very sort of keen thing to be aware
Speaker 1: of with all of this is when they do these studies,
Speaker 1: you are looking at a point in time, a snapshot
Speaker 1: in time of when someone does this study, it might
Speaker 1: be when the siblings are eighteen, fourteen, and nine. You
Speaker 1: do that same study with that same family when you
Speaker 1: know ten years later, and they might you might get
Speaker 1: wildly different results on who these people are and what
Speaker 1: their personality is like. So it's you know, you really
Speaker 1: have there's so many things to account for. I don't
Speaker 1: know that you can draw some sweet conclusion, like everyone
Speaker 1: keeps desperately trying to do right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it makes sense too, because I mean it's
Speaker 2: called the perfect age compound if you're looking at just
Speaker 2: a snapshot in time. Of course, the eighteen year old
Speaker 2: oldest born is going to be more conscientious than the
Speaker 2: nine year old baby of the family. That's just how
Speaker 2: it works. That has to do with growing up right,
Speaker 2: not where you were born, in your sibship, your position.
Speaker 2: And then also, of course the nine year old's going
Speaker 2: to be more likely to wander off into the woods
Speaker 2: and have fun with their friends than the eighteen year old.
Speaker 2: That's just part of being young. So that definitely explains
Speaker 2: it quite a bit to me if you ask me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think where I end up is like
Speaker 1: I think there is a lot to birth order and
Speaker 1: I think it's bound to have an effect on who
Speaker 1: you turn out to be, along with a lot of
Speaker 1: other factors in your life. But I think it's one
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 2: Okay, well there you go. Well Chuck said he thinks
Speaker 2: it's one of them, which of course triggers listener me.
Speaker 1: I'm going to call this a follow up on France's Kelsey,
Speaker 1: which I thought was pretty cool. We did a shorty
Speaker 1: recently on Francis Kelsey, one of the heroes of the FDA,
Speaker 1: and we got a letter from Katie entitled, my sister's
Speaker 1: hero was Francis Kelly. Dearest Josh, Chuck, Jerry, and Dave's spirit.
Speaker 1: David appreciates that. Thank you. You guys have no idea
Speaker 1: how thrilled I was to listen to today's short stuff
Speaker 1: about Francis Kelsey. This woman is my sister Sarah's hero.
Speaker 1: Like Sarah put a portrait of doctor Kelsey in her
Speaker 1: child's nursery. Hero, my sister Sarah has been telling us
Speaker 1: for years about the important contribution that Kelsey made to
Speaker 1: public health and women's health as a whole, but specifically
Speaker 1: to maternal, infant, child, and adolescent health. And that sounds
Speaker 1: after I read this, I was like, oh man, I
Speaker 1: wish we could have done a full thing on Francis Kelsey.
Speaker 1: Sarah works tirelessly in adolescent sexual health despite all the
Speaker 1: fire public health has been under for the past few years.
Speaker 1: Her devotion to protecting the health of teens, regardless of
Speaker 1: their gender, sexual orientation, or citizen status makes me proud
Speaker 1: to be her sister. I'm so happy at Public Servant
Speaker 1: was highlighted on your show. Thanks from the bottom of
Speaker 1: my heart for sharing the story so more will know
Speaker 1: about doctor Kelsey's works. From a long time listener, Katie. Katie,
Speaker 1: this is great and Sarah love that you're doing this
Speaker 1: good work. It's amazing and I'm curious about your birth
Speaker 1: order now.
Speaker 2: Very nice. That was a great email, Katie. That was
Speaker 2: a very sweet thing to send us, So thank you
Speaker 2: for it. And hats off to YouTube Sarah. Like Chuck said,
Speaker 2: and if you want to look up to your older
Speaker 2: sibling or younger sibling or whatever, we'd love to hear that.
Speaker 2: You can send it to us in an email to
Speaker 2: Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 3: more podcasts my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
Speaker 3: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.