Scattershot Approach — Getting Parental Attention After Bedtime

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• My freshman comp students often used to write papers on sibling birth order, so I have assimilated some basic knowledge of this subject.

  As the youngest of three, I learned negotiating skills that I feel have helped my career. My wife, who is the oldest of three, is definitely used to being in charge. She tells how she used to be able to pick up her little brothers and carry them out of her room if they bothered her. As a little brother myself, I was officially banned from my siblings' rooms after a regrettable incident in which I found and sampled my sister's stash of Easter candy. But I could get my older brother to carry something heavy for me by complimenting him on his weight-training exercises, and being officially banned from my sister's room in a way helped my sister and me to grow close. Since I had to request permission to enter my sister's room, and I never remember a single time she refused my request, that meant the time I spent with her in her room was explicitly valuable -- we kind of officially signaled to each other (I by requesting permission, she by granting it) that yes, we did want to spend time with each other.

  I haven't looked much into the technical details of what IQ is and what it actually measures, but this study looks lik it offers good evidence of the social component of intelligence.

• Dennis: Here's an interesting post on birth order and intelligence from Science Magazine posted to AP. Don't know if I quite concur with the conclusions though. The article also seems to say that intelligence is socially constructed which makes sense. It's possible to learn throughout your lifetime given a supportive community of family, friends, and colleagues....Depends a lot what type of test is given.
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  Families' eldest boys do best on tests

  By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science WriterThu Jun 21, 5:54 PM ET

  Boys at the top of the pecking order ? either by birth or because their older siblings died ? score higher on IQ tests than their younger brothers. The question of whether firstborn and only children are really smarter than those who come along later has been hotly debated for more than a century.

  Norwegian researchers now report that it isn't a matter of being born first, but growing up the senior child, that seems to result in the higher IQ scores.

  Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal report their findings in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

  It's a matter of what they call social rank in the family ? the highest scores were racked up by the senior boy ? the first born or, if the firstborn had died in infancy, the next oldest.

  Kristensen, of Norway's National Institute of Occupational Health, and Bjerkedal, of the Norwegian Armed Forces Medical Services, studied the IQ test results of 241,310 Norwegian men drafted into the armed forces between 1967 and 1976. All were aged 18 or 19 at the time.

  The average IQ of first-born men was 103.2, they found.

  Second-born men averaged 101.2, but second-born men whose older sibling died in infancy scored 102.9.

  And for third-borns, the average was 100.0. But if both older siblings died young, the third-born score rose to 102.6.

  The findings provide "evidence that the relation between birth order and IQ score is dependent on the social rank in the family and not birth order as such," they concluded.

  It's an issue that has perplexed people since at least 1874, when Sir Francis Galton reported that men in prominent positions tend to be firstborns more often than would have been statistically expected.

  Since then, several studies have reported higher intelligence scores for firstborns, while other analyses have questioned those findings and the methodology of the reports.

  While the Norwegian analysis focused on men, other studies have included women, some indicating a birth-order effect and some not.

  Frank J. Sulloway of the Institute for Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley, welcomed what he called the Norwegians' "elegantly designed" analysis.

  "These two researchers demonstrate that how study participants were raised, not how they were born, is what actually influences their IQs," said Sulloway, who was not part of the research team.

  The elder child pulls ahead, he said, perhaps as a result of learning gained through the process of tutoring younger brothers and sisters.

  The older child benefits by having to organize and express its thoughts to tutor youngsters, he said, while the later children may have no one to tutor.
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  Science: http://www.sciencemag.org