Birth Order
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Birth Order Destiny Cunic1 and Kevin Bennett2 1 Pennsylvania State University, Beaver Campus, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 2 Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University, Beaver, Monaca, PA, USA
Synonyms Family constellation; Family order; Sibling order
Definition The idea that the order in which a child is born within their family has influence over their development and personality.
Introduction Birth order theory is the idea that the order in which a child is born within their family has influence over their development and personality. The theory was originally introduced by psychotherapist Alfred Adler in the 1920s (Eckstein and Kaufman 2012). Since Adler’s initial research, others have attempted to make contributions to the theory. However, research has resulted in inconsistent findings attributed to confounding factors that arise from the multifactorial context
of family environment, thus, leaving birth order’s influence on development and personality a debated scientific topic.
Cognitive Development Some studies suggest that cognitive development, such as intelligence, personality, and sexuality, can be affected by the order of an individual’s birth within their family. Several of these previous studies have concluded that first-born children have slightly higher IQ’s than later-born children (Belmont and Marolla 1974; Rohrer et al. 2015; Silles 2010). Furthermore, IQ was found to decrease roughly 1.5 points per birth order position, and, overall, a randomly selected first born child is 52% more likely to have a higher IQ than a randomly selected second born child. This effect was found to be even greater when compared within the same family (Rohrer et al. 2015). Robert Zajonc attributed these effects to a model he first introduced, called the confluence model, which examines the development of individual differences in a social and environmental context. His research suggests that the lack of other siblings allows a first-born child to begin their development in an environment surrounded by adults and adult level intellect (Zajonc and Sulloway 2007). However, this model does not apply to only children and found that first-born children further benefit from the “tutor effect” in which older siblings help and teach their younger
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. K. Shackelford, V. A. Weekes-Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_678-1
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siblings, furthering their own proficiencies while doing so. Additionally, the model predicts “functional first-borns,” which are children who have a sibling at least 5 years older, that then benefits from the same or similar intellectual increases and may outscore the older sibling on intellectual testing (Zajonc and Sulloway 2007). The confluence model considers confounding and interrelated variables that influence an individual’s intellectual development in regard to birth order, taking into account factors such as the spacing between children and family size that influence the context of a child’s
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