
The Sibling Effect - llambda
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/books/review/the-sibling-effect-by-jeffrey-kluger-book-review.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto
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hugh3
It's amazing how much effort has gone into phoney-baloney correlations between
personality and signs of the zodiac, when there's so much _real_ correlation
between your personality and your birth order.

Also: how old you are compared to the rest of your class at school. The older
ones tend to wind up more dominant, the younger ones less so.

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sliverstorm
People _want_ the Zodiac, because the Zodiac is friendly and harmless. There's
no "bad" sign to be born under.

Birth order, on the other hand, is something wholly out of your control with
substantial rammifications. They aren't always pretty rammifications. People
don't really like to hear about that sort of thing.

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vwoolf
I would imagine people should _want_ to know that birth order can have
profound effects on their personality and disposition: then they can try to
actively counteract or encourage those tendencies. What you're not aware of,
you can't change.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
What you aren't aware of can't be used to describe your victim status.

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ryanlchan
Is this getting blown a bit out of proportion? The correlation with birth
order is 3 points on an IQ test - for reference, texting has been shown to
drop your IQ by as much as 10 points [1].

Much like a MBTI, this is probably useful in the broad sense, but should not
be depended upon objectively.

[1][http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/st...](http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/student/news/article384086.ece)

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kellishaver
I think the social impact of siblings is probably more significant that the
intellectual one..... whatever that may be. I don't actually have any personal
experience to draw from here. I grew up an only child and am raising an only
child.

