Who's Smart Now?Emily Bazelon takes readers' questions on the purported IQ advantage of firstborn siblings.
Posted Thursday, June 28, 2007, at 4:03 PM ETSlate senior editor Emily Bazelon was online at Washingtonpost.com on Thursday, June 28, to discuss the research into birth order and intelligence. An unedited transcript of the chat follows.
Emily Bazelon: Hello and welcome—I'm online and looking forward to your questions.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUpon_______________________
Washington: The biggest flaw that I can see in the study is its assumption that sample size is equivalent to randomness. The database of 240,000 men comes from military records of men born in the late 1970s. People who come from families that volunteer for military service are not random—they're very different from the general population. Also, the study assumes that the stair-step IQ phenomenon will translate to women, because IQs are equal between the sexes. The study says the stair-step phenomenon occurs because elder of children's teaching of younger children. However, men and women differ greatly in how they are raised. Larry Summers, ex-President of Harvard, lost his job because he asserted that girls and boys are intellectually different in ways that don't relate to how they are taught. Yet the author of the study says that girls and boys are taught identically because the IQ outcomes are identical. Politicized science at best.
Emily Bazelon: Hmm, that's an interesting critique about people who are drafted v. not drafted, and one that I'd not heard before. The trick would be to show that the difference matters in terms of the way kids in different places in the birth order are treated.
About girls: This really is an open question. This study was based entirely on boys, as you know; some experts think the results translate to girls (and the press coverage tended to go along). I didn't look into this closely but I tend to share your skepticism.
_______________________
Fairfax, Va.: As someone who does well on IQ tests, I've always felt that these things primarily measure how well you take tests. Is this study looking at any data that's more useful than IQ test scores?
Emily Bazelon: Ah, yes, the elephant in the middle of the room. I'm also not a big fan of IQ tests—what are they really measuring? A friend suggested this morning that maybe this study could do some good by making the IQ measure seem evern more annoying than usual, the province of bossy, uppity eldests. Ha! This study only measured IQ, so no supportive data, no.
_______________________
Fairfax, Va.: Red Herring alert! Much more important than a 3-point IQ differential is whether there's anything about being a first-born or later-born that affects success and achievement and happiness. I have two sons who fit the Achievement Motivation theorists' stereotypes: first-born serious, reponsible to a fault, comfortable with adults from an early age; second takes life easier, more of an optimist, more sociable with peers. They've both done fine, have professional degrees, good jobs, great families. But they are still (in their 30s) very different people, regardless of their measured IQs. It's what you do with all your abilities (not just traditionally measured IQ) and how you find a place in your world that matters in life.
Emily Bazelon: Yes, this is the key point that I tried to make at the end of my Slate piece. I talked about a 1989 study published in Science showing that in small and medium sized families, birth order had no effect on educational attainment. So if that little IQ edge exists on average, later born kids on average are compensating for it. There's lots of different kinds of smarts!
_______________________
Conestoga, Pa.: When I was in graduate school I was taught that while IQ tests didn't really measure intelligence, they were good predictors of how someone would do in school because Binet, the developer of the IQ. test, developed a test that his good students did well taking. As I understand it, we don't have a good idea of just what intelligence is, so measuring it is a bit problematic. It's probably not accurate to say that first born sons are more intelligent or smarter than their younger brothers; it is only accurate to say they do better on IQ tests.
Emily Bazelon: That's a good point. So then what do you do with the lack of evidence that first borns go further in school? Do you take it to mean that this 3-point edge doesn't really exist, or that IQ is an addled concept?
_______________________
Indianapolis: So, where do you come in your family's birth order? Why does this topic rankle you so?
Emily Bazelon: I've got to tackle this one, right? I'm the oldest of four girls. I'm not sure any of us ever had our IQ tested and if I did, our parents probably made a point of not finding out the score. They were v. into the idea that it's what you make of your brain, not what's in it to start with.
I generally get annoyed when studies are hyped the way this one was—as if it was the definitive, end-of-question say on the matter. But I think I also got rankled because my youngest sister found it upsetting. She said it made her feel sort of cheated and bitter, and she is hugely successful! But I think that's what these sorts of findings so often do—divide people. And for no good reason. Statistical findings that measure averages have nothing to do with my family or anyone else's particular family.
_______________________
Wheaton, Md.: I think its very obvious that, on average, the first born in large families becomes more successful. But isn't that probably more because of parents' preferences, along with their ability to pay for college. (Much harder to pay for that fouth child's tuition.)
Emily Bazelon: You may be right that parents put more attention and effort into first kids, esp in the beginning when they're also only kids. And if finances come into play, then yes they could play a role. But attention, of course, can backfire, and I'd like to hope at least that parents figure out a way to apportion money fairly among kids.
_______________________
Simsbury, Conn.: The question about the nature of the sample (drawn from the military) is moot. All young men in Norway are required to register for the military, and the IQ testing is done at the time of registration. The study relied on those tests.
Emily Bazelon: aha. Good point, thanks for making it.
_______________________
Washington: Because the study showed that the IQ advantage passed on to the next-oldest if the eldest brother died, I think we younger ones know what we have to do.
Is It More Important for Your Turkey To Be Organic or Local?
Why Gift Cards Are a Terrible Gift
Is Sarah Palin's Approval Rating Really as High as Barack Obama's?
Justice Scalia's Most Eccentric Habits
Adam Lambert's Refreshing Non-Apology on the CBS Early Show
Democrats Have a Lot To Be Thankful For
Remarks from the Fray:
While I'm prepared to accept there's a possibility that secondary children may come into a more intellectually impoverished environment & may not have the same resources to draw upon, framing it in terms of IQ is altogether more problematic (if not actually doing more harm than good).
It comes down to the inherent inaccuracy & usefulness of the test. What they substantially deal with is the ability to retain & organize data & not much else. This describes a great deal of what computers do. Cleverness, wisdom & most especially the creativity required to achieve these qualities are very poorly measured, if at all. Same for curiosity & intuition & probably much else. You get the point.
There's a lot of agreement on this but some "experts" still have problems not quantifying things with this test. The history of the IQ test drills this home. I remember reading a beautifully researched article in The Atlantic magazine explaining that the inventor of the test was much lauded for it as it was enthusiastically adopted everywhere. After a period of time, he could see it was being misused to categorize people inappropriately & said so - decades before this became common knowledge.
The various powers that be unanimously ignored him because they loved the bureaucratic possibilities it represented. In time the problems were acknowledged & numerous "fixes" put in place but the test although much diminished in stature is still cited by some hangers on who have no other ideas on how to make the intangible tangible.
The press needs to educate the public more often & deeply that curiosity & creativity are the foundation of intelligence. The latter the only quality that ensures genius (the ability to be visionary by making leaps, sometimes called lateral thinking). IQ tests as stated, are extremely poor at measuring this.
--john1
(To reply, click here.)
(6/30)