An Effect of Birth Order on IQ
Over my undergrad and graduate career, I've read a lot about intelligence. It's overall a very controversial topic in psychology. A new Norwegian study published in the journal Science quite convincingly demonstrates that older siblings (in the case of this study, they looked at 241, 310 men) will have a slightly higher IQ than their younger siblings. What is fascinating is that it is not so much the effect of being the first born as the effect of being the eldest in the family, because this effect was also found in boys whose oldest sibling had died during childhood and now found themselves the oldest of the family. A companion article by a psychologist at Berkeley outlines plausible reasons for this effect. The most likely theory is that oldest children find themselves in roles of tutoring youngest children and sharing knowledge and that this role benefits more the oldest child than the youngest. Anyway, there are many more fascinating intricacies to it all, but I thought this was so interesting.
Labels: neuropsychology, psychology, science
posted by Brain Diva at 11:07 p.m.
3 Comments:
See, this is why I am so smart. There is a huge age gap between my elder sibs and I, so I was an "oldest" for a while. :p
I'm psyched you posted about this actually. I saw the study and wondered how credible it was.
I believe it, too. I am biologically the youngest, but once my parents got remarried, I spent most of middle school and high school as the oldest in the house and I DEFINITELY have the highest IQ of the bunch. (Not that that's any big feat; I'm just sayin').
LOL I will caution that this study was only conducted with male siblings so I don't know if it generalizes to women. Nevertheless, the methodology did appear quite sound and they really had such a huge sample that it gives you enough statistical power to detect small differences. :)
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