Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:13:13.609Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Personality and Birth Order: Explaining the Differences Between Siblings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Judith Rich Harris
Judith Rich Harris*
Affiliation:
Middletown, New Jersey, USA
Get access

Extract

What struck me most forcefully in Townsend's critique (this issue) was a pattern he observed: A large preponderance of the changes he documented in Sulloway's numeric or graphic descriptions of data resulted in improvements. The later data point was almost always a better fit to Sulloway's predictions than the earlier one. Townsend suggested that further analysis would be appropriate, which made me wonder why he stopped where he did, without doing any statistical tests on his findings. A possible next step would be to calculate the likelihood that the observed proportion of changes in the confirming direction occurred by chance alone.

Type
Roundtable Commentaries
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , September 2000 , pp. 160 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abramovitch, R., Corter, C., Pepler, D.J., and Stanhope, L. (1986). “Sibling and Peer Interaction: A Final Follow-Up and a Comparison.” Child Development 57:217–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beer, J. M., and Horn, J.M (2000). “The Influence of Rearing Order on Personality Development within Two Adoption Cohorts.” Journal of Personality 68:789–819.Google Scholar
Blake, J. (1989). “Number of Siblings and Educational Attainment.” Science 245(July 7): 32–36.Google Scholar
Deater-Deckard, K., and Plomin, R. (1999). “An Adoption Study of the Etiology of Teacher and Parent Reports of Externalizing Behavior Problems in Middle Childhood.” Child Development 70:144–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ernst, C., and Angst, J. (1983). Birth Order: Its Influence on Personality. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Freese, J., Powell, B., and Steelman, L.C. (1999). “Rebel Without a Cause or Effect: Birth Order and Social Attitudes.” American Sociological Review 64:207–231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, J. R. (1995). “Where Is the Child's Environment? A Group Socialization Theory of Development.” Psychological Review 102:458–89.Google Scholar
Harris, J. R. (1998). The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. New York:Free Press.Google Scholar
Harris, J. R. (2000a). “Context-Specific Learning, Personality, and Birth Order.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 9:174–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, J. R. (2000b). “Socialization, Personality Development, and the Child's Environments: Comment on Vandell (2000).” Developmental Psychology 36:711–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hauser, R. M., Kuo, H.-H.D., and Cartmill, R.S. (1997). “Birth Order and Personality among Adult Siblings: Are There Any Effects?” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America, March, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Jefferson, T. Jr., Herbst, J.H., and McCrae, R.R. (1998). “Associations between Birth Order and Personality Traits: Evidence from Self-Report and Observer Ratings.” Journal of Research in Personality 32:498–509.Google Scholar
McCall, R. B. (1992). “Academic Underachievers.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 3:15–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDonagh, J. (2000). “Science without a Degree of Objectivity is Dead.” American Psychologist 55:678.Google Scholar
Paulhus, D. L., Trapnell, P.D., and Chen, D. (1999). “Birth Order Effects on Personality and Achievement within Families.” Psychological Science 10:482–88.Google Scholar
Reiss, D. (with Neiderhiser, J.M., Hetherington, E.M., and Plomin), R. (2000). The Relationship Code: Deciphering Genetic and Social Influences on Adolescent Development. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rodgers, J. L., Cleveland, H.H., van den Oord, E., and Rowe, D.C. (2000). “Resolving the Debate over Birth Order, Family Size, and Intelligence.” American Psychologist 55:599–612.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenthal, R. (1987). Judgment Studies: Design, Analysis, and Meta-Analysis. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rowe, D. C. (1994). The Limits of Family Influence: Genes, Experience, and Behavior. New York:Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Salmon, C. A., and Daly, M. (1998). “Birth Order and Familial Sentiment: Middleborns are Different.” Evolution and Human Behavior 19:299–312.Google Scholar
Sulloway, F. J. (1995). “Birth Order and Evolutionary Psychology: A Meta-Analytic Overview.” Psychological Inquiry 6:75–80.Google Scholar
Sulloway, F. J. (1996). Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. New York:Pantheon.Google Scholar
Sulloway, F. J. (1998a). “How is Personality Formed? A Talk with Frank Sulloway.” Edge (May; http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge40.html).Google Scholar
Sulloway, F. J. (1998b). “Birth Order and the Nurture Misassumption: A Reply to Judith Harris.” Edge (November; http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge47.html).Google Scholar
Sulloway, F. J. (1999). “Birth Order.” In Runco, M. A. and Pritzker, S. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Creativity, Volume 1. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Turkheimer, E., and Waldron, M. (2000). “Nonshared Environment: A Theoretical, Methodological, and Quantitative Review.” Psychological Bulletin 126:78–108.Google Scholar