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Firstborn Get the Brains
Dekortage writes "Eldest children have higher IQs than their siblings, according to a recent study by Norwegian researchers. The study focused on men, particularly 'on teasing out the biological effects of birth order from the effects of social status,' but indicates that the senior boy in a family (either by being firstborn, or if an elder brother died) has an average IQ two or three points higher than younger brothers. As noted in the New York Times coverage, 'Experts say it can be a tipping point for some people — the difference between a high B average and a low A, for instance... that could mean the difference between admission to an elite private college and a less exclusive public one.'"
And what is the standard error on the particular IQ test they used?
...the senior boy in a family... has an average IQ two or three points higher than younger brothers... Experts say it can be a tipping point for some people Well, that explains why I'm a network admin instead of the CIO.I also wonder if being a middle child has any effect on IQ...
I wonder if I will get those extra IQ points if I eat his brains...
Help test the
It wouldn't surprise me, as the act of teaching while learning tends to reinforce the learning. The oldest kid, whether consciously or not, ends up demonstrating any new knowledge and capabilities to the younger kids in the family or neighborhood.
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Firstborn Get the Brains would be an awesome name for a zombie movie!
(Pardon my stupid ramblings - I'm not an eldest son, you see)
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
How does the eldest sibling being a girl effect this?
Sounds to me like this study is meaningless anyway. They focus on men from one country, an affluent country with little liklihood of malnutrician being a factor, and all at the same point in their lives, being during compulsary military service. That carries with it the further distorting factor that none of these men were disqualified for reasons of physical/psychological disability, and to be honest, if you're educationally sub normal, you ain't getting to play with guns...
Reality is that which, when we cease to believe in it, still exists. - Philip K Dick
Well, I have some very reliable evidence that the seventh son is the most powerful, but only if it's a seventh son of a seventh son.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
Yea, but Peter took over the world while Ender only saved it.
In spite of what some would like to tell you, IQ is not a measurement of intelligence. It could be considered a measurement of knowledge and training. Admittedly those who are "More intelligent" in theory could learn better, but these things are so screwy that this is essentially meaningless.
Maybe first born are just home bodies, and thus spend more time studying.
Ok, I give up, why you?
I can say that my older brother's high IQ is severely hampered by severe lack of common sense :P
I'd be more interested in seeing a study that not only includes girls, but breaks down as such:
Family of only boys
Family of both with boy as eldest
Family of both with girl as eldest
Family of only girls
For my experience, I am the first born (girl) with one younger sister; I'm a graphics/web designer/computer geek and she's a scientist who works in a lab with dangerous chemicals. If there is a difference between us it's slight. I'd wager that would hold true for most girl siblings regardless of pecking order.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
TheLink, women can't go to college
(Just kidding. Until last fall my wife had a higher level of education than I did)
but... that can't be true, I'm not the first born in my family, and my older sister... frist post!!! GNAA!!! In Soviet Russia...
Oh wait, ok, I guess I can kind of see their point...
Interesting study and the stats seem to back up their theory. However, the IQ difference is so subtle that I wonder how much difference it really makes. Does an IQ of 102 really provide that much of an advantage over someone with an IQ of 100?
:) Your first child gets all your energy, and you try out interesting things, go to interesting places. The arrival of the second child means you now divide your time and energy and so the second child will tend to lose out. When the first child leaves the house the second child is nearly full grown anyway.
Based on personal experience raising two daughters, I'm sure that part of the reason the second child lose two points of IQ is that the parents just start getting tired.
I wonder if they looked at homes where the children were very far apart in age? Suppose one child was 10 when the second child was born. By that time the parents are comfortable with the progress of child #1 and might devote more time to child #2 than they would have if the children were only a year or two apart.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Some of us have to finish reading it, you insensitive clod!
I wuz born sevunteenth you insensuhtive Claud!
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I wonder, though, if there isn't a broader organizational behavior principle at work here.
Keep an eye on the phrase How often at work is there a tautology, whereby the senior headz are the only ones equipped to perform certain tasks/make decisions, simply by virtue of longevity. Once they retire, get flattened by a bus, or move on to a position at the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen, then the next person in line steps up.
Thus, I dispute the title "Firstborn Get the Brains", and offer instead that, in families as in other organizations, we do a sub-optimal job of affording the juniors the opportunity to negotiate the learning curve.
"Firstborn Get the Brains" somehow implies that the womb retains some state in between children, and knows to shortchange the later arrivals.
My younger brother and sister have also floated some really irritating cop-outs based on this birth order talk. Raises my hackles. I had been going to troll this article using Exodus 13:12 calling it subliminal Christian propaganda, but then I thought the better of it.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
So isn't this theory anti-evolution? The younger children are less smarter than the oldest one.
better than public? Not really. For example, in CS you have places like UC Berkley, University of Maryland, University of Washington that are competitive with places like MIT and CMU. All those schools are public(though they might as well be private for students out of state, but I digress)
A lot of people like denigrating public universities, but I don't really understand why. To be honest, they are some pretty bad public universities, but there are also bad private schools as well (Patriot University, Regent University etc)
Monstar L
So you can probably tell that I'm a firstborn, otherwise I'd be 'doing' something interesting instead of posting on /.
So you're the youngest, eh? Sorry dude, better luck next reincarnation.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Just to commit a plural of anecdotes error:
Einstein was the older sibling, as I think is Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler and Robert Oppenheimer - doing fine so far. On the other hand (and merely AFAIK), Blaise Pascal was the second son, Dirac was the second son, Niels Bohr was the second of three, Faraday appears to have been well into the plurals and Ernest Rutherford was the fourth-born child. Van de Graaff had three older brothers, all of whom were into football rather than physics.
All of which may go to suggest only that seventh sons don't necessarily need to sell their scientific calculator and resign themselves to brainless toil quite yet.
Ender wasn't smarter than Peter or Val, he was more emotionally suited for Battle School. Not too cruel, not too merciful.
In this study, they had 241,310 subjects. If memory serves me right, the population standard deviation is 15 points, so we have a margin or error along the order of 15 divided by the square root of 241,310, or 0.03. That is, two orders of magnitude smaller than 3 IQ points, which to you 'seems almost within the margin of error'.
Of course, the actual margin of error depends on other things, such as how many children were firstborn in the sample, how many were secondborn, etc. Still, with such a large sample, the final standard deviation should be much smaller than a single IQ point, making their conclusions statistically interesting. And, in fact, if the results were not statistically significant, they wouldn't get published very easily, and certainly not in Science.
While I agree that often times an IQ test does not mean much with respect to a person's success in life, IQ tests are generally designed to test aptitude and ability to learn...NOT training and knowledge. Whether or not these tests successfully do this is a matter of debate, of course...but the intention IS to test aptitude not knowledge.
Grades aren't meaningless if you have any plans to attend University. They aren't meaningless if you plan to earn an MBA, MD, LLB, or a graduate degree (Masters, PhD, etc.).
It's true that a lot of people have earned a great living despite poor grades or lack of education, but these people represent a minority. For many people, grades are a major factor in determining acceptance or rejection to paths of life that guarantee some amount of financial success.
It's fairly easy to figure out how school grades can translate into money. If you've got top grades, you earn a chance at being accepted to a Law school (for example). Once you've done your time, you are practically guaranteed a six-figure income: that's money in your pocket because you excelled at school. However, if you act as if grades are irrelevant, you're success might just be dancing with Lady Luck.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Ah, yes...another case of "how to distort the truth with statistics".
Statistically, when you have a large number of individuals in your study (e.g., 250,000 is a huge number) you have a large amount of statistical power to detect minor differences.
In this case, while they detected a significant difference in IQ scores (whether or not IQ scores measure actual intelligence is subject of a different post), the difference may not have any practical meaning - "2 or 3 points" on a scale that has a standard deviation of 15 points is a very small effect (and thus has little practical meaning).
Does this mean that China's one child policy is creating a race of Han superchildren? Unless, of course, you fail to have a son the first time, then you can try again.
That kids at different points in the family structure get different amounts of parental attention. And that's just to start with. The firstborn gets usually, years of exclusive attention which the younger kids by definition can never have.
Deleted
I can't put my hands on the exact set of studies right now so this will only be anecdotal evidence, but there are examples of "quite young" siblings being quite brilliant compared to next older siblings precisely because there was just enough age difference between the youngster and an older (teenage plus) sibling that was close enough to an adult to provide direction in problem skills at a nearly adult level AND still be young enough and close enough to how a little kid thinks to teach those skills in a way that makes sense to littler kid at their lower developmental level.
What I am really saying is that an article built around an averaging statistic like those quoted are useless news, not stuff that matters.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Clearly, the first born gets all of the parents attention for some period of time, before the second is born. The second gets only (roughly) half of the parents attention. I would be very surprised if parental attention at a young age does not have a large effect on the child. Giving one child twice as much parental attention as the other, for the first year or two of their respective lives, seems likely to give the one an advantage over the other. A small difference in communication or learning skills acquired during that first year might make the first born better able to learn other things later in life.
The observation that first-born children score higher on standardized tests does not speak to the cause of that difference. A correlation does not imply a cause.
Coincidently, I am the first-born of three. I have a Ph.D., the middle sibling has a masters, and the youngest has a bachelors.
Indeed, scientific knowledge is prone to error. But, you cannot publish in the particular journal 'Science' if your results are not statistically significant - in the technical meaning of the term. Which is all I said, and all I meant. I did not say that the results were correct, just that they were statistically significant, which was doubted in the comment I was replying to. (You can certainly doubt if statistical significance leads to 'truth'; many scientists do.)
I think a big factor in this is the pressure that firstborns receive from the parents to succeed. Parents tend to pile their hopes onto the first child but are more relaxed the second time around.
What's more interesting is the way he did it. Locke (Peter) was basically a blogger who became so popular he amassed real political power. That may seem unlikely today, but thirty years or so, when the distinction between TV and internet vanishes, it seems conceivable that someone could rise up from the media/infotainment realm into the political realm.
Vote Wiggin in '38!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
I have to agree, I'm the second of two though, and while my brother always did better in school, my scores on SAT and IQ tests were 5-10% higher than his. I just didn't care about what they were teaching in school because I already learned the stuff by reading his schoolbooks.
OK, just went back and read the article (go figure)...
Kristensen, of Norway's National Institute of Occupational Health, and Bjerkedal, of the Norwegian Armed Forces Medical Services, studied the IQ test results of 241,310 Norwegian men drafted into the armed forces between 1967 and 1976. All were aged 18 or 19 at the time.
The average IQ of first-born men was 103.2, they found.
Second-born men averaged 101.2, but second-born men whose older sibling died in infancy scored 102.9.
And for third-borns, the average was 100.0. But if both older siblings died young, the third-born score rose to 102.6.
At no point do they actually tie the first born from a family with the second born from the same family. It might be that first born sons were the ones that got sent to college and were exempt (not sure if college was an exemption in Norway as it was in the US), whether they were more intelligent or not. It could be the first born sons were more financially capable of fleeing the country. It might be that the first born sons were too old to be drafted. And what about all the first born men who didn't die in infancy, but died at an older age doing something incredibly stupid? It could also be that on average, second sons are more intelligent, but "only sons" are MUCH more intelligent than average and therefore skew the average. There are all kinds of reasons that the study can easily be called flawed and account for the 2% difference.
Only on Discworld. On Discworld, cubes are the powerful numbers. On Earth it's the primes.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
I'm a firstborn zombie.
Braaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiinnnnnssss....
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
His analysis of all these things led him to believe that academic underachievers of a certain vein learn creative ways to get around things, or are out to prove people wrong regarding others saying they'll never amount to anything due to poor grades.
Neither of my two older brothers are as smart as I am.
"Send an Instant Karma to me" - Yes
who knows...maybe jeb is a complete dumbass
no i have not shot my gun in the air and gone 'Ahh!'
either by being firstborn, or if an elder brother died)
Well then it isn't biological if the death of someone older occurs. It means that the parents paid more attention to the child. This isn't something new. My wife and I were looking into overseas adoption and the person we were talking to said that with infants you find about 1 month delay for every 3 months in an institution aka orphanage. She said that she saw this with both of her adopted children and the remarkable thing was that they did catch up at a remarkable rate once they were in their home. Almost like going from crawling to walking in mere days.
I would be more interested in a study showing the learning rates between children with a parent who stays home compared to ones who are in daycare part-time, full-time and the sad cases where they spend majority of a 24 hour period in daycare cause mom and dad need a new Beemer.
Such evidence does exist, but for different reasons. In the case of sexual orientation, the effect is because successive births change the hormonal environment of the womb. But for IQ it was social rank, not biological birth order. If someone had an elder brother who died young (making them biologically a secondborn but socially a firstborn), they looked like a firstborn.
This leads to an important point. All of the discussion has been about birth order, but the scientific importance of this study is broader than that. What's really exciting about this study (IMHO) is that it provides compelling evidence that family social environment affects intelligence. This flies in the face of recent arguments by Judith Rich Harris (who has been enthusiastically received by Steven Pinker, the Freakonomics guys, and others), claiming that parents don't matter.
> If you've got top grades, you earn a chance at being accepted to a Law school (for example). Once you've done your time, you are practically guaranteed a six-figure income: that's money in your pocket because you excelled at school.
/ _Lawyer/Salary
http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Attorney_
More like, "almost a 6-figure income after 20 years". You, like many non-lawyers, grossly overestimate how much lawyers are paid.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Average IQ is not the same thing as getting a higher degree. Simply because your brothers are laborers doesn't make them idiots. Though, the fact that you would "never believe a study that some moron publishes" doesn't go out of it's way to show how brilliant you are. Rather than finding some methodological problem with the study, you resort to calling the publisher a moron. Could it not be true that the study found higher IQs in the elder children because they were older, or because of the deaths of the previous eldest child. Studies have found that over ones lifespan the smartest people were still alive. They lost a set of Scottish IQ scores from about 50 years ago, found them again, then brought back in some of the people. The only people left were those who scored the highest on the test previously and they improved their scores for the most part. These two items could cause the skew in the study. The eldest child male might have been a died leaving a smarter second child to stand in his place, or the eldest male might have just been older and as a result done better on the test.
Though, all of that has nothing to do with your objections. You objected because it's doesn't apply in one case? How about all those people who kept cackling that "I'm the youngest and I'm not gay" - after that study which found rather than 3% youngest children stand a 5% chance of being gay. Average means it doesn't apply to everybody, just applies more often than it doesn't.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.