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The Sibling Effect

nytimes.com

30 pointsllambda11 comments

It's amazing how much effort has gone into phoney-baloney correlations between personality and signs of the zodiac, when there's so much real correlation between your personality and your birth order.

Also: how old you are compared to the rest of your class at school. The older ones tend to wind up more dominant, the younger ones less so.

It seems plausible to me that the season you are born in (and thus, the season of your gestation) would have an effect. Especially in more dramatic climes, and in times previous to refrigeration, rapid transport of food, climate control. Different foods and vitamins would be available, which do have an effect. There could also be a markedly different social atmosphere in different seasons, lazy summer, forboding autumn, austere winter, hopeful spring.

Thus, it wouldn't be 12 divisions, but perhaps 4 or so (and rotated 180 in the southern hemisphere). And possibly not apparent in modern society.

EDIT (goodness, downvote?) some studies: intelligence correlation (http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/health/people-born-in-sp...) ----- anorexia correlation http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...

People want the Zodiac, because the Zodiac is friendly and harmless. There's no "bad" sign to be born under.

Birth order, on the other hand, is something wholly out of your control with substantial rammifications. They aren't always pretty rammifications. People don't really like to hear about that sort of thing.

Ehh, first and last are both pretty good. Only middle is slightly problematic, and the middle children of the world can band together and whine about their victim status.

/youngest of three

I would imagine people should want to know that birth order can have profound effects on their personality and disposition: then they can try to actively counteract or encourage those tendencies. What you're not aware of, you can't change.

What you aren't aware of can't be used to describe your victim status.

I'm having some trouble finding the reference right now, but IIRC, there are some real effects from when during the year you were born -- largely due to cutoff dates for school, determining how old you are relative to everyone else in your class. I'll have to go actually dig this up later.

This is referenced in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers when he discusses who makes it on to the Canadian Jr National Hockey team: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)

>when there's so much real correlation between your personality and your birth order //

Do you mean this or do you mean position in pecking order (I guess studies are needed to show it).

I was youngest of two but lived as youngest of four (and not in an enlarged step-family). I feel that the inter-relationships between me, my sibling and my sort-of-siblings is more key to my make up than strict birth order.

Presumably if you're the youngest of 8 but you're adopted in to a family as the eldest (at a young age) then you're more likely to develop as if you were an eldest child.

tl;dr - hypothesis: it's not birth order but age in your groups.

Is this getting blown a bit out of proportion? The correlation with birth order is 3 points on an IQ test - for reference, texting has been shown to drop your IQ by as much as 10 points [1].

Much like a MBTI, this is probably useful in the broad sense, but should not be depended upon objectively.

[1]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/st...

I think the social impact of siblings is probably more significant that the intellectual one..... whatever that may be. I don't actually have any personal experience to draw from here. I grew up an only child and am raising an only child.

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