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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 ET

Slate 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.

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Emily Bazelon: now there's a dastardly effect of this study that I hadn't thought of—mass fratricide!

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Washington: Interesting theory. How does it apply to twins? Also, just because someone has a higher IQ doesn't mean they have more common sense.

Emily Bazelon: Twins, in some of the literature, come out sort of screwed. The idea is that they tax their parents more, and so get less of the good stuff poured into them. But you know I feel badly even writing that, because I don't know how good those studies are, and even if they do hold up we are talking again about averages, not indiv families.

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Washington: Do you think parents could influence the effectiveness of the mentoring so that it benefits the younger child more?

Emily Bazelon: Sometimes I think parents can't influence much of anything. And in theory I generally think it's better for parents to keep their noses out of sibling interactions (though believe me in practice I do that all the time).

If I was going to try to give my younger son, Simon, the chance to do more tutoring v. being tutored, I think I'd encourage him to develop some skill that my older son, Eli, doesn't have. Like music or something? But in the end I'm skeptical about how much you can orchestrate this stuff. And you know, maybe a more useful approach is to make it safe for Eli to let Simon guide him. I think oldests can get too reliant on always being the one who knows the answer, and then find it hard to let younger siblings lead, even in small ways.

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St. Mary's City, Md.: Have researchers found psychological and emotional differences between first-borns and others? I'm a first-born and I know a few others, and we seem to share a need to please people. My theory is that our inexperienced parents hadn't yet developed confidence in their abilities and had high expectations of us.

Emily Bazelon: There is a big dispute in the social science lit about how birth order affects personality. If you want the "yes, it matters! take, you can take a look at Frank Sulloway's Born To Rebel. His argument is that firstborns are solid achieveers, but younger borns are the ones who change the world. For a v. smart skeptical take that birth order (and parenting) really alter or establish kids' personalities, I recommend Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption.

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Just an observation: While not scientifically based, as a child care provider and teacher for many years, this news comes as no surprise. As a first-born you have your parent's undivided attention, with plenty of one-on-one time. Parents tend to me more relaxed with second, third, etc. children—there is less mystery for them about raising their child, there are more demands on them with a larger family, while they provide equal measures of love and care the intensity level is not there, and the younger sibs are allowed to develop and expolore at their own pace—which might just skew their IQ lower.

Emily Bazelon: yes, the undivided attention theory is the main one that believers in firstborn IQ advantage put forward. It's funny, though, because before the age of 12, firstborn IQs actually test LOWER in some studies. So then you have to explain why first lower, and later higher. And the theory there is that oldest's initially benefit from the extra dose of parents, but then see their environment "degraded" by the younger sibling—baby talk, playing up instead of playing down, etc. So then they backslide, but later on, after 12, the benefits of tutoring their younger sibs kick in, and they get the IQ boost.

I dunno. It's all too convoluted and complicated for me.

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Alexandria, Va.: Are three IQ points statistically significant? If you take a couple thousand people who scored 112 on an IQ test and a couple thousand peopel who scored 109 on the same test, and test both groups again later, will the 112 group still score higher?

Emily Bazelon: I don't know about the results for taking a second test. But this question about the significance of the 3 point difference is coming up a lot. On an individual basis, it's meaningless: that is to say that in any one person's life, there are lots of other factors that will determine what he or she doesn't achieve, so who cares? But over a group of people, a 3 point difference does matter. In an accompanying editorial for Science, Frank Sulloway says that if Norway (where the study was done) had only two colleges, an A one and a B one, the 3 point difference would mean that an oldest child would be 13% more likely to be admitted to the A school. So there you have it, for what it's worth.

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Takoma Park, Md.: As the oldest of five, I forwarded the article to my family members with a bit of tongue-in-cheek glee. I think we all have achieved very different but satisfying levels of success in our adult lives. My mother did remark, however, that the amount of time spent interacting with each of her children diminished as her family grew. She told me that she does feel that one-one-one time between parents and children does increase early knowledge and awareness early in life, and I—as the oldest—most likely got more of this type of interaction.

Emily Bazelon: Is this an argument for being the oldest, or for having smaller families? There's another side to this, though. In big families, the kids get the benefit of each other as well as their parents. And sometimes that's a v. powerful influence, in a positive way. I have to say, though, based on my own experience as 1 of 4 that it is also exhausting and chaotic!

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Seaford, Del.: Did this study control for the distance between the ages of the brothers? Does it make a difference in the IQ gap if the brothers are one year apart vs. three or four years (or more)? lso, did they study what happens when there are more than two brothers? Some of this IQ boost seems to come from helping to teach the younger siblings. Did the study say anything about whether having several younger siblings would increase (or decrease) the IQ of the oldest child?

Emily Bazelon: I don't remember any controlling for age gap or family size. You can check the whole thing out at science.com.

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Frederick, Md.: This study came as no surprise to me—I have known for years that I am intellectually superior to my younger brothers. I did have two questions. Has any corresponding work been done on EQ and birth order? While I have had more academic success, I will admit my youngest brother is much better at picking up girls. In addition, I was wondering if any cross-gender studies have been done?

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Emily Bazelon edits Slate's health and law columns and writes about law and family. She previously worked as an editor and writer at Legal Affairs magazine and as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

COMMENTS

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

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