Core Concept: Pop psychology loves to claim that firstborns are natural leaders and youngest children are rebels. This episode unpacks large-scale research demonstrating that birth order has a surprisingly negligible effect on personality traits, debunking a widely held family myth.

References

Black, S. E., Grönqvist, E., & Öckert, B. (2018). Born to Lead? The Effect of Birth Order on Noncognitive Abilities. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 100, 274–286. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00690 Cited by: 230

Damian, R. I., & Roberts, B. W. (2015). Settling the debate on birth order and personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112, 1 ...