In answer to a September question of whether leaders are born or can they be taught I responded, “Does it matter?”

Ongoing research has opened the possibility that it’s not genes, but birth order that may make the difference. It’s a long way from being proven, but anecdotal stories and recent studies lean toward at least some credibility.

“For a long time, researchers have tried to nail down just what shapes us–or what, at least, shapes us most. And over the years, they’ve had a lot of eureka moments. First it was our parents, particularly our mothers. Then it was our genes. Next it was our peers, who show up last but hold great sway. And all those ideas were good ones–but only as far as they went.

The fact is once investigators had strip-mined all the data from those theories, they still came away with as many questions as answers. Somewhere, there was a sort of temperamental dark matter exerting an invisible gravitational pull of its own. More and more, scientists are concluding that this unexplained force is our siblings.”

A companion article looks at the possible effect of birth order on our professional lives.

“It’s not clear whether such behavior extends to career choice, but Sandra Black, an associate professor of economics at UCLA, is intrigued by findings that firstborns tend to earn more than later-borns, with income dropping about 1% for every step down the birth-order ladder. Most researchers assume this is due to the educational advantages eldest siblings get, but Black thinks there may be more to it. “I’d be interested in whether it’s because the second child is taking the riskier jobs,” she says.

Black’s forthcoming studies will be designed to answer that question, but research by Ben Dattner, a business consultant and professor of industrial and organizational psychology at New York University, is showing that even when later-borns take conservative jobs in the corporate world, they approach their work in a high-wire way. Firstborn ceos, for example, do best when they’re making incremental improvements in their companies: shedding underperforming products, maximizing profits from existing lines and generally making sure the trains run on time. Later-born ceos are more inclined to blow up the trains and lay new track. “Later-borns are better at transformational change,” says Dattner. “They pursue riskier, more innovative, more creative approaches.”

Parents vehemently deny that they have favorites, but

“While the eldest…has it relatively easy—getting 100% of the food the parents have available—things get stretched thinner when a second-born comes along. Later-borns put even more pressure on resources. Over time, everyone might be getting the same rations, but the firstborn still enjoys a caloric head start that might never be overcome.

Food is not the only resource. There’s time and attention too and the emotional nourishment they provide. It’s not for nothing that family scrapbooks are usually stuffed with pictures and report cards of the firstborn and successively fewer of the later-borns—and the later-borns notice it. Educational opportunities can be unevenly shared too, particularly in families that can afford the tuition bills of only one child. Catherine Salmon, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Redlands in Redlands, Calif., laments that even today she finds it hard to collect enough subjects for birth-order studies from the student body alone, since the campus population is typically overweighted with eldest sibs. “Families invest a lot in the firstborn,” she says.

All of this favoritism can become self-reinforcing. As parental pampering produces a fitter, smarter, more confident firstborn, Mom and Dad are likely to invest even more in that child, placing their bets on an offspring who—in survival terms at least—is looking increasingly like a sure thing…Firstborns do more than survive; they thrive. In a recent survey of corporate heads conducted by Vistage, an international organization of ceos, poll takers reported that 43% of the people who occupy the big chair in boardrooms are firstborns, 33% are middle-borns and 23% are last-borns. Eldest siblings are disproportionately represented among surgeons and M.B.A.s too, according to Stanford University psychologist Robert Zajonc. And a recent study found a statistically significant overload of firstborns in what is—or at least ought to be—the country’s most august club: the U.S. Congress. “We know that birth order determines occupational prestige to a large extent,” says Zajonc. “There is some expectation that firstborns are somehow better qualified for certain occupations.”

I find this especially interesting. It seems to me that first born would also have the highest sense of entitlement, which might explain at least some of the recent scandals where self-image preservation and ego were motivating factors.

The research is a long way from being proven.

“The most vocal detractors of birth-order research question less the findings of the science than the methods…. “I would throw out all the between-family studies,” says Bo Cleveland, associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University. “The proof is in the in-family design.”

But to my mind the more burning question is whether you’re locked into the pattern and I for one refuse to believe that any of us are unalterably predestined for a certain role or specific behavior patterns.

Being aware of the research means that you can measure it’s applicability against the traits that you don’t like in yourself. The downside is that it provides a built-in excuse for not changing, if that’s what you’re looking for, whereas the upside is a leg up, allowing you a short-cut to identifying the underlying factors of your own actions.

Additionally, as a parent, studying the research can help you short-circuit them within your own family. Although I’m certainly no expert, logically it would seem that being very conscious of your own actions (and not rationalizing them) and how they affect each of your children would help; also spending more time and energy doing for the younger siblings what is done for the eldest could make a difference.

Whether for yourself or your kids, you need far more information than is available here or from the articles, but it’s a starting point. How far you want to take it and how much energy you want to expend is up to you.

As always, it’s your choice.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Change, Personal Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.