HOME / the chat room: Real-time discussions with Slate writers.

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.

(Continued from page 2)

RSS

Emily Bazelon: By EQ do you mean emotional intelligence? Not that I know of in particular, though lots on personality, which may cover this question in some way.

As for picking up girls, maybe that's got nothing to do with who's born when?

_______________________

Intelligence of the parents: I find it more fascinating when two dopey people produce smart kids. I had a close friend like that. Her parents were borderline challenged. I did not even like to be around them because they were so dopey (not adopted and I am sure). She was the seventh child of eight and very smart.

Emily Bazelon: Intelligence is partially but not entirely inherited, that is genetic. Then of course there's environment, but parents don't totally or even perhaps mostly control environment. So your friend had her own genes, and influences beyond her family, and she thrived. It's pretty cool, really, to remember how limitless human potential can be.

_______________________

Silver Spring, Md., Mom: My daughter was deemed gifted and talented in the Montgomery County school systems. We moved down to Florida for nine months, and in order for her to be considered for gifted and talented programs down there they required her to take an IQ test. At 10, she scored 129, but they have a plus or minus one rule, so she was approved for their gifted and talented program with a an IQ score of 130. Does three points really matter? In the eyes of God, no, but in the eyes of the "establishment" it just might.

Emily Bazelon: so there you have it—a real life example. Maybe 3 points off the G&T cut off they wouldn't have gone for.

_______________________

New York: Hi Emily. Growing up in heavily Catholic Providence, R.I., during the 1960s, when the average family size was six (many families with more than four children), my anecdotal experience in no way confirms the data of the researchers. In our parochial school, as well as at others I knew of, the correlation between birth order and intelligence just wasn't borne out in the same way. I wonder aloud about a class bias in the research; older siblings in my working class milieu were caregivers, house helpers and—during teenage years—workers after school. Doting parents and deferential treatment of the sort suggested by the research had no place in our world.

Emily Bazelon: well that's the thing about the Norwegian guys being drafted: The draft is universal there, so you shouldn't see a class bias in the data. On the other hand, Norway may be different from the US in ways that matter for this birth order qu. On Huff Post, Dalton Conley has a smart post about Norway's emphasis on primogeniture. Could also affect the relevance of the finding for girls, too.

_______________________

Portland, Ore.: Correlation and causation are two different things. Simply because someone finds a correlation between IQ and birth order in no way proves that one causes the other. For example, research on convenience store purchasing patterns have found a correlation between the purchase of beer and diapers. That doesn't mean that beer causes diapers, or that diapers cause beer. The purchases of both may be caused by, shall we say, "hidden factors"...

Emily Bazelon: oh so true, and almost always the limitation of social science research, AND what we forget when we're reading and thinking about it.

_______________________

New York: I remember participating in a survey years ago as a first-born. I remember reading the results: we first-born were disciplined more, spanked more, etc. Is there perhaps a connection, that the discipline perhaps made us more focused on studies and thus we achieved higher IQs (pretending, of course, that I actually automatically have a high IQ because I am a first-born)?

Emily Bazelon: If you buy this IQ edge, then yes you could imagine that parental expectations help account for it. And certainly a lot of oldests have the impression that their parents were tougher on them and then let up on their younger siblings. I'm not sure, though, that I see the link to IQ edge—if the punishments and discipline were sort of knee-jerk and irrational (and I feel like I make more of those mistakes with my oldest child, probably) then they're probably not doing much good.

_______________________

Philadelphia: You mentioned Judith Harris in your Slate piece. She cites studies that show that identical twins separated at birth have closer behavior than fraternal twins raised in the same household—and that adopted children have no more likely shared behavior traits with their new siblings than any two randomly chosen children—to make the point that parents have virtually zero impact on a child's behavior when it grows up. Do you agree with this take on genetics and parenting? If so, isn't all of this talk about birth order a total waste of time?

Emily Bazelon: Judy Harris is one of my favorite writers (and sources). She is so provocative and such a good needler—she really makes you rethink your assumptions! Her reading of the literature is a great humbling reminder for parents, I think, and also a reason for us to chill out. We have the idea that every little thing we do affects our kids so much, when in truth because of heredity (genes) and outside-the-family influences, we are really not so important.

I do agree with her on that, though I hesitate before throwing out ALL parental influence (maybe I just can't bear too!) And yes I do think that birth order is hugely important to us—but doesn't determine what we end up doing and how we succeed at it. If that makes sense?

_______________________

Statistically significant:"An A one and a B one, the 3 point difference would mean that an oldest child would be 13 percent more likely to be admitted to the A school." Because the 3-point-higher was actually-for-real smarter and learned 13 percent more in high school, or because whoever decides on admissions looks at IQ scores and gives 13 percent credence to what is actually a random within-the-error-margin meaningless number difference?

Emily Bazelon: You know, Sulloway doesn't explain, but he's got to be making some sort of extrapolation from IQ to grades. And I wonder what the evidence is for that.

_______________________

Washington: As the youngest sibling, I am nothing but grateful from the tutoring given by my older sisters. Well worth the three IQ points.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 SINGLE PAGE

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

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

(To reply, click here.)

(6/30)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES