Name
Parent Directory
Birth Order Effects
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…
7,248 people gave me enough information to calculate their birth order… in order to be absolutely sure I wasn’t making this mistake, I concentrated on within-family-size analyses.
For example, there were 2965 respondents with exactly one sibling… and a full 2118 of those were the older of the two. That’s 71.4%. p ≤ 0.00000001.
This effect reaches the same scale as other effects people consider important. For example, the survey population drew heavily from STEM fields and was predictably very white; however, the birth order gap was larger in magnitude than the racial gap.
If we suppose that birth order has a moderate effect size on intellectual curiosity of 0.5 SD, that would imply that science blogs select for people in the top 3% or so of intellectual curiosity, a much more reasonable number. Positing higher (but still within the range of plausibility) effect sizes would decrease the necessary filtering even further.
©Andrew Swift · top · more · contact