Fight Me, Psychologists Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Very Strong
Astral Codex Ten Podcast · Jeremiah Prophet
Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (traffic.libsyn.com) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.
Show Notes
"Birth order" refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how their birth order affected their personality: oldest children are more conservative, youngest children are more creative, etc.
Then people got around to actually studying it and couldn't find any of that. Wikipedia's birth order article says:
Claims that birth order affects human psychology are prevalent in family literature, but studies find such effects to be vanishingly small….the largest multi-study research suggests zero or near-zero effects. Birth-order theory has the characteristics of a zombie theory, as despite disconfirmation, it continues to have a strong presence in pop psychology and popular culture.