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Old July 27th, 2007, 02:28 PM
James Brody James Brody is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Philadelphia area
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Default Sulloway: Born To Be Smarter

Journal Watch Psychiatry: a valuable tool for those of us who track both medical and behavioral strings and levers on what we do. Sometimes they put up free stuff! In this case, about one Frank J Sulloway!

JimB
http://psychiatry.jwatch.org/

Summary and Comment: Jonathan Silver, MD

Social birth order is associated with IQ.

I always knew my older brother was smarter than I. Now, a study confirms this by associating birth order with intelligence. But, is it being the oldest or being the firstborn that is associated with higher IQ? The investigators distinguished between biologic birth order and social birth order by examining intellectual performance in men whose older siblings had died.

The subjects were 241,310 male Norwegian conscripts born from 1967 through 1976. The intellectual test administered to the conscripts is highly correlated to IQ. The researchers examined only sibships with intelligence test results and with at least one male born first, second, or third.

Analyses were adjusted for possible confounders, e.g., parents' education.

Firstborn men had a greater mean IQ than did those born second or third
(103.2 vs. 101.2 and 100.0). Mean IQ was 102.9 in second-born men with
early loss of an elder sibling and 102.6 in third-born men with early loss
of two siblings.

Comment: Social birth order, not biologic birth order, predicted IQ. What occurs within the family influences the development of intelligence. A remaining question is the importance of this difference in IQ. On first
blush, 2 to 3 IQ points do not seem clinically significant. However,
commentator Frank Sulloway notes that if a new therapy produced a 13%
difference (the estimated relative risk ratio) in IQ, it would "make
front-page headlines."

Sulloway argues in his book Born to Rebel that those who are not firstborn
also benefit from birth order, specifically in creativity and forging new
paths. So, younger sibs should not be depressed we don't need those few
points, anyway.

Jonathan Silver, MD

Published in Journal Watch Psychiatry July 23, 2007 Citation(s):

Kristensen P and Bjerkedal T. Explaining the relation between birth order
and intelligence. Science 2007 Jun 22; 316:1717. (Subscription may be
required) (Free)"

Sulloway FJ. Birth order and intelligence. Science 2007 Jun 22; 316:1711-2. (Subscription may be required) (Free)"
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