Fight Me, Psychologists: Birth Order Effects Exist And Are Very Strong | Slate Star Codex

“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. I ought to be totally in favor of getting this debunked. After all, the replication crisis in psychology highlights the need to remain skeptical of poorly-supported theories. And some of the semi

“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