Stuff You Should Know - Is birth order important?

Episode Date: April 23, 2019

There have been a lot of studies over the years regarding birth order. Some conclude that it's a big deal, while others more or less discount its importance. Learn all about it today. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Ubichuk.

Brian, there's Jerry over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know. The podcast. Jerry, were you a, what was your birth order? Oh, Jerry's a middle child. Two of two or two of more. So you're the baby. You don't know this?

No, did you? Sure. No. I've known Jerry for like 13 years. So have I. Well, not that long, 12 years. So have I. Well, no comment.

Well, what am I? I don't know. That's right. I know. What? I didn't know that. Yeah. I didn't ask what you were.

I know you know what you are. What am I? This is a quiz time. You're not going to just, I wasn't calling you out. Oh, well, I was calling you out in a humorous way. And I called you out. It's hard not to look at this stuff through your own lens though, of your own family, you know?

Are you changing the subject? No, I'm getting on with it. Oh, okay. Because as the youngest of three, and all of us have three distinct personalities, it's hard not to kind of like think about birth order. Right. And if that's a thing.

Right. And it may be, and it may not be. Yeah. It depends on which scientist you're asking. I tend to think like there's just no way it doesn't have any effect. No, I think it definitely has an effect, but as we will see, it is one part of a huge pie.

Yes. That indicates what kind of person and personality you might have. Well, plus also it's devilishly tricky to analyze, to study. Because of how big that pie is. Yeah. There's so much going on with your personality that to just pinpoint one thing,

even a big thing like where you're born in a family, it's just tough to pin down. So. You're the youngest, right? Good guess. Yes, I am. I knew you were the youngest. I'm like, I wear that on my sleeve.

I feel like I kind of do too. Hmm. In a lot of these. Maybe I guess in some ways, but like I was reading this checklist for the youngest. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, I guess so. Let's do this.

Should we go over that stuff first? Yeah, totally. All right, so this is like the sort of macro view of how a lot of people think of birth order. Is that a fair way to say it? I would call it pop psychology. Yeah. So if you were born into a family,

there's basically four ways that you can be born in some sort of order. You can be the first born, you can be a middle child, or you can be the last born. And then if you're a real outlier, okay, you're right, so there's five. Or a triplet.

Oh God. Yeah. Let me get me started. Let's just say a multi. Okay, a multi. Or you can be an only child too. Sure. And all of them have distinct personalities.

Again, according to pop psychology, but also according to every person who's ever been born into a family especially. Yeah, yeah. And so with the first born, the whole theory of basically birth order, where you're born into the family unit that you're born into and what effect that has

on your personality and how it develops, it all seems to come down to this idea that you are born into a family where there is a finite resource called parental attention. And then that is a pie that gets increasingly divided up into smaller and smaller pieces, the more and more children that are born. Cause your parents can't possibly give five kids

the same amount of attention that they could give an only child. It's just not possible. And so what dynamics are created in the personality of the kids born into that family, depending on how many others are born and depending on where they fall in that birth order. That's kind of the premise of the whole thing.

And over time, people have said, well, this is what the first born's like. This is what the middle's like. This is what the baby's like. Yeah. And there were, I mean, a lot of this are, these are generalizations, but they're generalizations, like you said, that kind of everyone who's ever been in a family

can kind of say, yeah, that's kind of true. Right. You know, when you have an only or your first kid, this article references as that first sort of experiment, you don't know what you're doing yet. You're probably going all in, depending on how lazy you are or how motivated you are as a parent with this,

you know, being a super parent. And then if supposedly, as you have more children, you get, it's not only is your attention divided, I think, but there's the notion that you also are like, you know what, I probably don't need to be as crazy with number two and number three, leave them to their own devices. As a third kid, I'm not going to get into

too many depressing details of my family growing up. But like, by the time I was 10 and 11, my parents had other things going on. And I wasn't feral, but- Other kids on the side. Not exactly. I wasn't feral by any means, but I was, I did not have rules imposed on me

like my brother and sister did. I did not have, I was allowed to go to Panama City for spring break and they weren't. I was allowed to kind of do my own thing. And I was trustworthy, so that probably had a lot to do with it. If that would have been a real problem, they might have clamped down a little more,

or maybe not. And they probably wouldn't have necessarily clamped down like we need to give Chuck way more attention and guidance than we have been. They would have probably been like- Crime and punishment. They would have been like, we're sending Chuck to rehab or whatever.

You know what I mean? Let rehab take care of our reform school or something like that. Because once you get X number of kids in, you're just so tired and you're older too. Sure. Like when you're chasing a little kid around in like your 40s or 50s,

that's different than when you're chasing a little kid around in your mid 20s. I can't imagine. A world of difference, you know? So there's a lot of resources, not just parents' attention, but also their time, intellectual attention that they'll give a kid,

like in say like hanging out, teaching the kid to read, that kind of stuff. And just attention in general. And also financial resources. The family's resources in general are a pie that must be divided among all of us. Yeah, financial, emotional, all that stuff, instructive. Yeah.

So generally speaking, firstborns, people say tend to be very conscientious and structured and reliable and high achievers. Yeah, because their parents are focusing like a laser on them. They know everything that kids got going on, maybe a little too much. And the kid is responding to this

by basically becoming a perfectionist and really wanting to be around their parents. Their parents' friends, more mature. Very much mature because they're, all of the people or most of the people they're hanging out with are adults. Yep. Okay, so that's a firstborn typically, right?

Everybody knows it, don't try to deny it. Middles in general are people pleasing, which is so my brother. That's weird to me because when I think of middle children, I think of Jam Brady. And Jam Brady was not a people pleaser. She was just a lump, like a lump with a cloud over her head. Poor Jan.

But that's true, like I would not characterize Jam Brady as a people pleaser, would you? No. Like she was gonna burn something down eventually if the Brady bunch had stayed on the air long enough. Was also a blended family. So what was, who was the, it was Bobby and then, was it Peter?

Well, Peter was her lateral, I guess you'd call it. Was he a people pleaser? Or just a Peter pleaser? More than Jan, more than Jan. But blended families do confound things. We'll get into that later. Yeah, for sure. But people pleasing, somewhat rebellious,

which is not my brother at all. Large social circle, not really my brother. And a peacemaker, totally my brother. He's the best. He's the best. And then the youngings, youngies, youngins, like us, most free spirited, fun-loving, uncomplicated, manipulative.

I've been called some of these things, to varying degrees. Self-centered, attention-seeking, and outgoing. Check and check. But uncomplicated. Combine you and I, and we're sort of like the proto-youngest. Uncomplicated, though. I'm like, I don't get that.

I'm exquisitely complicated. On the surface, you wouldn't think it, but I'm pretty complicated, as we all know in this room. But that's the only one that I'm like, that I question. Yeah. All the rest of them are like, yeah, that makes sense. Looks like the Chinese zodiac.

You look at that menu and you're like, oh, I'm a total dog. Yes. And Mugu guy, Pan, sounds great right now. Onlys, no siblings. You are, what they call, almost like a super firstborn. Which sounds scary. All of the traits of a firstborn on steroids. Very much perfectionist, very much more mature for your age,

conscientious, diligent, prone to be leader. Can leap over tall buildings. And then, this is where it gets interesting, and this sort of starts to. Finally, everybody, this is where it starts to get interesting. Well, this is where it gets in a little bit, like how complicated it can get,

because there's so many factors at play, like what if you're in a blended family? Cause that kind of throws it all out of whack. Yeah, dude, because. Or it can. If you're born a firstborn, and your parents get divorced and you go with your mom, who gets remarried to a dude who has a.

Mike Brady. Yes. To a smashing cool architect. For sure. And he has a kid that's a little older than you. Greg. Greg's the firstborn. You're not the firstborn anymore.

The best you can hope for is to form some sort of confederacy or alliance with Greg to rule the rest of the siblings. But you're not the head honcho anymore. You're not in charge. That's a big deal. I can't imagine many more traumatic experiences, especially when that follows closely on the heels

of your parents divorce or the death of like your other parent. That's gotta be one of the most traumatic things a kid can go through, is to lose their identified perch in the family order. Yeah. And that's where we were talking about like the firstborn, like the baby of the family.

If all of a sudden there's a younger, no good. Like I remember my parents for some reason, talking about adopting a kid. I can't remember how old I was. I must have been about seven. And I remember breaking down and crying and just being like, you can't do this. You cannot bring in someone younger and cuter than me.

And that happens. I'm losing my looks. I'm seven. A blended family. But all of a sudden you have to be a younger or God forbid a baby. Just forget about it. You can't compete with that.

You gotta kill that baby. Well, that's what happened too. When Brady Bunch started to lose ratings, apparently your family was losing ratings. So they were talking about that. They brought in cousin Oliver, a new baby. I don't think Bobby was very happy about that either. No, but just think about Jan.

It all makes a little bit more sense. Like she was like, I'm the middle child. And then they brought in three more. And she was like, I'm even more middle. Yeah, you're deluded. The middle child is deluded. And if you have multiple middle children, forget about it. That's right.

However, here's the thing with blended families. They say by about the age of five, that a lot of your personality is set. So if you're older than five and all of a sudden your family is blended, they say it may not make that much of a difference. No, no, no, that's where it's trouble. If you're younger than five

and your personality is a little more plastic, if you were born a baby of the family and suddenly you're a firstborn or you're a middle kid, you'll adapt to that a lot better than you would if you're older and you're more solid in your birth order. Yeah, I didn't mean not trouble. What I meant was like, if you're like 12 years old

and the family blending happens, it's trouble, but it's not like your personality is like all of a sudden, I'm the youngest or, you know what I mean? Like you don't all of a sudden swap to a different birth order personality, I don't think. Right, but if you're younger and it happens, you do. Right, under the age of five. Which goes to show that if this is a thing,

and we'll talk about whether it is or not soon, it has nothing to do with biology. It has everything to do with nurture, not nature, because a kid can adapt depending on when this happens. They can adapt to a change in birth order if they're young enough. That means it has nothing to do with biology. It's all the environment you're raised in,

which is the most boneheadedly obvious thing on the planet. And then before we take a break, there are also gap children. Supposedly if there's at least a five year gap between births, then it just sort of resets. That was like me and my oldest sister. She was 13 years older than me. She was just like this older, cool person,

but not like an older sister, not at all overbearing, really like sweet and looked out for me, I guess a little bit. Or like a second mom kind of to an extent. Cause that does happen too, if there's a big gap or a big family. Like I dated a girl in New Jersey that had those like six or seven of them.

And by the time she came around, she was kind of fully being raised by her siblings. Right. So what happens when there's enough of a gap, a new family birth order forms. So like if you have an oldest, and then there's multiple years, like say 10 years between your oldest and your middle,

and then two years between your middle and your baby, the middle and the baby are going to form a firstborn and a lastborn type relationship. Yeah. And the lastborn is always going to be the lastborn. Yes. Regardless of gap. But then twins, like you were saying, is one last confounding thing.

Yeah. Twins or triplets, multiples as you call them. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. They form their own family unit within the family too, with each other. And apparently, no matter where they're born, twins never act like middle kids.

They always act like the firstborn or the baby, but to one another. Right. And I think they generally come together to kill the parents. Basically. Right. They hold hands. It's like an elevator of blood washes around them.

And then finally, with adoption, they say that depending on when your child is adopted, the same kind of scenario happens as in like with gapped and blended families. Right. Whereas if the kid's young enough, he or she will tailor their birth order to the family that they're adopted into,

but if they're older, it'll be trouble. All right, that's a good overview, I think. I think it was a great overview, Chuck. So we're glowing from it. We're gonna, you do have that overview glow. We're gonna take a break and we're gonna talk about science, right after this. We're gonna take a break and we're gonna talk about science.

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we're going to talk about science because like I said, this is so boneheaded and obvious to every single person who's ever been born into a family. Everybody knows this stuff. Yeah. But as far as science is concerned, this is not proven that birth order effects as they're called actually exist.

That science is saying, hold your, slow your roll, everybody. We can't actually prove that what everybody knows is actually true. Some studies show that yes, there is such thing as birth order effects. Other studies show that there is no birth order effect whatsoever.

And then some studies suggest that if there are birth order effects, they're so small that they are basically a blip on your personality, that all the other factors that form your personality, things like the socioeconomic status of the family you're born into, your racial background, your gender, all the other stuff. That is what really forms your personality,

not the order you're born into your family. That's kind of science's position right now. Yeah, but what they all agree on is that it is therapy cash cow. Right. Yes, it's a useful framework to approach psychotherapy from. And that's where the whole thing. They all wanna talk about it at high hourly rates.

See to me, I'm like, this is sure, this is exactly what forms your personality, but I get science's position, I respect it. So if we go back in time to the early 1900s, it was a man named Alfred Adler. He was a part of, he was a contemporary of Freud. And this is when all these dudes were getting together to talk about all this stuff and this burgeoning science

and they all thought they were so cool and important. And he was one of the only ones among his peers though at the time that was talking about birth order that early. And he went on to form what we know as Adlerian psychology or individual psychology. And it's basically a therapy based on how you perceive your own level of power

in your family, at your workplace, in the world at large. In general, like your perceived power, place of position or status, right? Yeah, and if he believed in birth order having a significant influence on your personality, then that in turn would influence how powerful you may or may not feel. Yeah, because to Adler, if how you perceived your own power,

not necessarily how powerful you were, but your own perception of power was the driving force of how you interacted with the world, your personality. Birth order would make total sense because birth order, as everybody knows, is nothing but positions of superiority or inferiority. And it's as simple as that. Because when you're born and you're a little kid

and you're born into a family with an older sibling, they are a couple of steps ahead of you because they've already been through a bunch of stuff. So they're inherently superior to you. They can also beat you up on a very basic level. They can twist your arm behind your back until it feels like it's going to break. And no matter how many times you say,

uncle, uncle, uncle, they won't stop until they're satisfied. Or protect you, like my big brother did. That's great. From his friends that were jerks to me. Right. He wouldn't stand for it. No, a couple of- We went at it too, you know, we were brothers,

but he never picked on me. No. You know why? Because you're Chuck. And he's Scott. Right. In the eighties is when, I mean, there were always studies

starting since Adler and Freud's time. But in the 1980s is when it really blew up thanks to the big five. Cocaine. And cocaine. The big five personality trait, the view of things. And that's when things in the eighties, that's when everybody was just like eating the stuff up.

Yeah, because so the big five personality inventory is, we've talked about it before, but basically it is a self-reported measure that is actually valid. It actually works. Like you can say this person is highly neurotic or this person is extroverted or, well, three others that I can't bring to mind right now,

but these things are also kind of broken into subcategories. Like these are big umbrella terms that have more specific subcategories, but it's actually like valid. Like somebody who fills this survey out, it's gonna be an accurate assessment of their personality. So if you have somebody's personality, that's huge, right? You can say, all right, if this person is neurotic,

they're highly neurotic, let's see what birth order they are. Are there a middle child? Let's compare them to other middle children who filled out this personality survey, scored high on neuroses. And all of a sudden we can show if you're a middle child, you're far likelier to be highly neurotic

under the big five personality inventory than a firstborn is, right? Boom, bam. You just proved that birth order effects exist, or did you? Yeah, they're like, we can put people further into a box and label them. Sure.

Or did you? Because that is sort of the paradox that we arrive at, which is you pointed to it a little bit earlier. There are so many, so many influences that go into what makes you, that it's hard to look at birth order as a mere small part of that. Like you can account,

you can account for some of these in studying it. You know, there's a lot of studies over the years and they do their best, but you can't account for all of them. Well, okay, so we'll go back to that example. So you've just gone to your peers and said, look, I have just proven that middle children are highly neurotic compared to other children

in birth orders, right? Then you're shaking your own fists around your shoulders in triumph. And they said, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Did you control for socioeconomic background? And you go, no, I didn't. Well, wait, did you control for race? No, did you control for gender?

No. And so all of a sudden you realize there's all these different independent variables. Out of tons. In this case would be confounding variables. That might actually be the thing influencing it. It might be the fact that they are women born into families of a low socioeconomic state

that is driving neuroses. That that's actually the thing that is driving it, rather than birth order. It has nothing to do with being a middle child. That's just a fluke, a coincidence. And like you said, there's so many confounding variables and so many things that make our personalities who we are that some people who are like birth order effects

do not exist, basically say that any birth order study that shows that they do exist has some confounding variable that's the actual hidden thing that's driving it, that you can't possibly control for everything to make a perfectly designed experiment for birth order. Yeah, like when you start to think about, like if you were just to sit there

and sort of jot down things as non-scientists, just regular schmos like us and just jot down a list of what other factors might be at play, we could probably come up with a list of a hundred things between us. Let's start now. But that would like, if I was studying the stuff and I started to make that list,

I would just walk away and go into another line of study. Sure. I would be like, dude, I just, you know, were your parents married? Were they divorced? When did they get divorced? Did you like hot dogs?

Did you live with mom or dad? How far apart did they live? What could do? Were you suburban? Were you urban? Yeah. Where did you live in an ex-hurb? Did you grow up in the woods?

Did you start work at 12? Were you like old-timey? I started work at 12. I guess I did too. I did paper route. Yeah, I was a busboy. Oh, nice. Oh wait, was that where the guy put his foot into the...

Yeah, yeah, projects too. What a criminal. I told you that's a title max now, that restaurant. I drove by it not too long ago. Yeah. I mean, yeah, J.J's barbecue, title max. Now they're putting their foot on titles, just stomping on them.

Yeah. But they got your money, your money, your real money. They're never gonna sponsor us now. Another few things that can confound these studies are things, and Ed helped us put this research together, things like demographic shifts. So he gave a great example of like the baby boom. If there's a big population bulge,

that also coincides with a lot of other stuff. And the example he used was prevalence of cigarette smoking. There may be a false correlation there between being a firstborn and smoking, whereas if you were secondborn 12 years later, I'll guess that would fall outside that range though of gap child. Maybe, but that's even more confounding.

The point's still valid. Sure. That like there's just way more firstborns who smoke than secondborns, but that's because smoking was more prevalent when there were a bunch of kids born who were all of the same cohort in all firstborns. Right.

That's just one of the ways this thing can be confounded. Yeah. Well, this one really speaks to me, which is labeled as growth. When a birth order effect does appear, it is strongest when the subject is with their siblings. Yeah. When you're a family reunion,

everybody falls back into that. It is so funny how that happens. I see myself do it like, good example. I turned 48 a couple of weeks ago. My family and my sister and her husband happened to be in town, didn't come for that, but we were texting and I was like, hey, let's all, you know, this is great.

Let's all go out to dinner. She's like, oh, well, I didn't want to, I just figured you wouldn't want to spend your birthday with your friend. You'd want to spend your birthday with your friends and not your family. And I saw Michelle when she got in town and she said the same thing in person.

I was like, dude, I'm 48. Yeah. It's like, I'm not 22 year old Chuck. I'm not some burnout. Like I used to be. And she just sort of laughed, but that's a perfect example of how like, no matter what happens in my life,

I will always be the baby. Yeah. And she will probably feel like she has to look out for me, which is a nice feeling. It is. I see Emily fall into patterns with her family. What is she? Well, she is a, she's an interesting case

because she was an only and then has a half brother and a half sister. Okay. Her dad, yeah, her dad went and had a son with another woman and then her mom got married to her father-in-law, Steve, who already had a daughter. So it's a sort of a weird mix, but I just mean in general, not even with siblings,

you know, just in how their family dynamic is, she's a different person when we go over there. Yeah, I think everybody is around their family. It's so strange. Yeah. So this is when it sort of started me down the path of like, what is personality? Is it a personality trait?

Is it this just, is it repeated behaviors? Is it a set of behaviors? Like, is that personality? Are you asking me? Yeah, I mean, I don't even know. Like, what is personality? We should do a show on that. Oh, we totally should,

but from what I understand, just kind of briefly put it, personality is the kind of predictable way that you'll react to the world, right? Is it easy for somebody to press your buttons? Are you laid back? Are you like, could somebody, however, if somebody were presented with that, this is going terribly,

if somebody were presented with like an event in life, you could say Josh would probably respond to it like that. That's a personality. Right, but is that something inherent or is it birth order or is it just a collection of learned behaviors? I think it's a collection of learned and reinforced behaviors too.

If you're told you're the baby of the family all the time, you're gonna act like the baby of the family. You're gonna act self-centered, you're gonna act manipulative, it's reinforced. If you're told you can do anything, you can go out and do anything. You can literally walk through walls because someone told you to,

they reinforce that behavior. But I think that's what personality is. And this is just me talking. I also believe in birth order effects, by the way. But I think that that is, it's learned and reinforced, which means it can be unlearned. You can learn to be different.

Yeah, at that same birthday dinner, I picked up the check for everyone. Oh, nice. And there was a bit of a, not an argument. Bloody struggle. My mom and I were kind of off to the side with the people who worked there doing the credit card battle.

And she wasn't super happy and I should have just let her pay. But it's part of that thing, like I'm the baby of the family. And I kind of just finally told us, like, listen, mom, it's like, it's my turn to pay. Nice. You know, I'm not the baby anymore.

Like quit writing me a check for $100 on my birthday. Do you, do you cash this? Yeah, I mean, I generally just put it in my kid's bank account. Oh, that's a good thing. You know? Yeah, we don't cash the ones. Because also don't want to take away the joy

that she gets from writing me that $100 check. Yeah, sure. That's not cool. No. It's like, I don't need that from her, but like that's what brings her joy. Yep. Giving you money.

It's complicated. So let me teach you a little trick. Oh, okay. If you don't want to get into that tussle, if you just wanted to be done, sorry, it's too late. When you order, when you hand the menu back to the server, just be holding your credit card with your thumb and give them a look.

It's universal. They all know and they'll take it and be like, and you got to it first. Nobody else does that. They always wait and they pretend to go to the bathroom like after everybody's done it, so obvious. You got to start before the food even comes, before the drinks even come.

You know what I did? What? When we got to the restaurant, the very first thing I did was go up to the manager while everyone was being seated and said, listen dude, my mom's going to try and pay or one of these other jumps in my family is going to try and pay.

I was like, I don't want any of them paying. It was like 12 people. I picked the place. I picked a nicer place. It's like, I don't want to do that. And I was like, so just here's my credit card. Please make sure that the server, there's no battle. They didn't follow your orders?

No, because my mom, she tried to jump me later on the side and didn't realize I had already jumped her. So it should have been done. I know, but then when we went over there, he was like, listen man, your mom is over here now. Like she's the mom. We generally side with the parents on this stuff. What place was this?

It was just a restaurant. I demand to know. I'm mad about this. Well, you think my move should have just trumped all moves? Yes. No, I agree. And that's what I basically said.

And I was like, listen, man, I was like, there are factors at play here that I don't want to talk about. Yeah. I was like, just please. And my mom got a little mad and then I was like, I blame this manager. I think you should expose them.

Well, I'm glad it all worked out in the end. Man, should we take a break? I thought we were right now. No. All right, we'll be back right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses

and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, we're back, Chuck. And like we said, we showed, science is kind of like, you know, we're not quite sure about the birth order effect. That hasn't kept like a whole cottage, like, field of psychology from continuing since the 80s, basically nonstop.

Like if you go look at birth order effects, there's, it's very rare you're gonna run into anything that says like, this is all BS. Most of it's like, yeah, this is true, everybody knows it. There have been some like prominent people in favor of, or like, like let's say yes, there is such thing as birth effects. And there was one guy in particular

who made a big splash in 1996 with a book called Born to Rebel. Yeah, Solaway? Yeah, Frank Solaway, Frank J. Solaway, if you wanna be fancy about it. And he got a MacArthur Genius Grant in 1984 to kind of study this and write about it. And he did, he wrote a book called Born to Rebel.

It was about birth order. And the whole premise of the book was, he looked at scientific revolutions throughout the ages. It was pretty interesting. Identified which scientists were on which side of it, either in support of this revolutionary thinking or opposed to it, meaning that they were in favor of keeping the status quo,

and then determined what birth order they had. And he found after this study, which is really, it was a big study that he did. And it was a pretty, a lot of legwork and a lot of research. He determined that firstborns are much more likely to support the status quo, whereas secondborns or laterborns, he calls them, are much more likely to support revolutionary thinking.

Yeah, and just one example, as far as he used Darwinism, he said laterborns between 1859 and 1875 were 4.6 times more likely than firstborns to support Darwinism. And that's just one example. And that's just revolutionary thinking. Yeah, and that was one of many examples. I think there were 121 historical events

with 6,500 individuals, either supporting or opposing them. So it was a big, big work for sure. Yeah, and one of his, I mean, he put some reasoning behind it too. He was like, if you're a laterborn, you might have a hard time competing with your older, who might have a tighter bond with the parents maybe. And so that sort of symbolically forces you

as to be almost an outsider within your own family. So you may be more prone to join up with an outsider opinion. Right, to go look outside of the family union and all of the values and the ideas that it holds to make your own mark in order to get attention or support or whatever from your parents. Whereas if you're a firstborn,

you just got the easiest thing to do is to just fall in line with your parents and hence support the status quo. It makes sense, but Born to Rebell was torn apart by some scientists. Sure it is, like this is just pure pop psychology tripe. I think that's an unfair characterization of it. Like the guy worked for basically 20 something years

on this stuff and it was a very robust study. One of the pitfalls that he seemed to have run into though was he was analyzing historical figures, which is really sticky stuff. You can't analyze people even from afar, even if they're contemporary, let alone they've been dead for a couple of hundred years. So to base it on that is kind of difficult and tricky,

but I just want to say he worked really hard on it. Another part plucked from his research I thought was pretty interesting was the idea that part of this less rebellious nature of a firstborn might be due to the long standing, but now sort of antiquated practice of primogeniture, which is the firstborn gets the inheritance. So they're more likely just through thousands of years

of this more inclined to like not ruffle the feathers of the parents. And then the laterborns who are like, I've got basically zero chance of inheriting the family titles in a state. I'll just go do my own thing. I don't have to fall in line. That makes sense as well.

And the other interesting thing with that is, another factor was the removal of a child from a family. He's found that a laterborn who was removed from the family and reared by a relative will end up behaving like a typical firstborn. And again, I'm assuming if that's under the age of like five. But I wonder, so I'm wondering if that just is supported by other research or if all of the parenting magazine articles

that mention that whole, the personality is tailored is really just citing that work. Cause that's one of the big problems with pop psychology in general is it's self-reinforcing. One person says one thing and it gets picked up by a bunch of people and they're all pointing to the same thing, but since so many of them are pointing, there's so many of them out there doing the pointing.

It seems like it's a very robust and like widespread body of work when really it was just one study that said one thing that everybody's citing. Well, yeah, like in his case, he likes to cite this Norwegian study. It found a difference of 2.3 IQ points between first and second born children, sample size of 241,000 subjects.

That's big. It is big, but then, you know, Ed sort of brings up a good point like, okay, maybe, but like, is a 2.3, first of all, IQ test or problematic? They're bonk. For like a lot of reasons. Cause they're bonk. Possibly bonk, but even if they're not,

is a 2.3 IQ point difference even meaningful? Yeah. Enough to be like, well, look, two points. So no, it's not meaningful in that like, you know, that doesn't, that's not gonna lead to any like closed doors or open doors or anything. That's just such a narrow difference. But if that's like an average and it's,

it is found across, you know, first borns and later borns, like in a very large population like that, it does make you wonder like, what would that come from? It does raise more questions, you know what I mean? So yeah, it's an insignificant difference as far as like actual intelligence goes, but it does suggest that there's something

weird going on there that does have to do with birth order. Well, I guess that brings us to this really interesting thing that I had never heard of before. Oh yeah? Had you heard of this? Fraternal birth order effect, which is basically the idea. And a lot of studies have backed this up.

Meta analysis of tons of studies have backed this up. The idea is that if you have multiple boys in your family, each successive boy that's born, and this is if it's just boys, has a higher chance of being gay. Right. I didn't think, and when I first saw that, I was like, that can't be real.

Right. And then I did a lot more poking around, and I was like, wow. It is real. The statistics sort of bear it out. Yeah, if there's a big disagreement about whether actual just regular birth order effects exist, this one is much more supported by the data.

Yeah. The fraternal birth order effect. And so much so that there was a sexologist, which if that were my field of study, I'd be like, call me sexologist, Josh, please. I can't find his name is Ray something. He said, and I'm not sure what he was basing this on, but he said that there is an increase of 33%

in likelihood that you will be gay with each additional older brother you have. Now, so that means if you're born into a family and you're the youngest of four brothers. I did this math. What does that mean? Because I'd know these people. Like I have friends and family that- It means that there's a 0% chance, I guess,

that you are going to be hetero. That you were 100% chance going to be gay, right? Well, how many? It could be 160% chance. Right, it just keeps going, right? Yeah, I mean, that can't be right. Eventually you become so gay, you pop out the other side and you're straight.

Because you have like 10 brothers. Well, I did see that meta analysis of multiple, multiple studies indicated that between 15 and 29% of gay males owe their sexual orientation to this effect, supposedly. Okay, so, and we should say there are some studies that have not found this. There was a big one that had,

there was like a survey of British young men that surveyed like 11,000 of them or whatever and did not find this. But so many studies have found it. That science is like, this actually might be a thing. We're not quite sure what it is. And at first they explained it that the more boys there are, the less social pressure there are for you to be like hetero

and responsible for carrying on the family line. Right, right, right. Like after two, three brothers who are gonna, you know, carry on the family line, go. Go crazy, go do what you want. And that that was the idea behind why it became likelier that you would be gay if you had more older brothers. There's a couple of things with that.

It kind of suggests that like being gay or not as a choice or being straight or not as a choice, rather than something biological, whatever. Right. That has kind of gone out the window with another really surprising finding that has to do with handedness that really undermines that whole idea.

Yeah, so this is so just mind blowing and interesting. So the increase in probability of a boy becoming gay is only if that boy is right-handed. Right, handed. Yep, so if you're left-handed, among left-handed men, there was no statistical difference in the incidence of homosexuality, even if you've got a thousand brothers.

And the weird thing about that is that they've found if you are taking birth order out of the equation, if you are left-handed, there's a slightly higher incidence of being gay. Just period. Yes, for being left-handed. And that's with men and women, apparently. So the idea that not only does it not make you more likely

to be gay as far as fraternal birth order is concerned, it actually negates the effects of fraternal birth order. It negates it. It shows that social pressure from brothers doesn't have anything to do with it. Right. Because a right-handed or a left-handed kid is not gonna be under any more or less social pressure

from older brothers to be straight. Right. That makes zero sense whatsoever. And that would also suggest since it's handedness that it has something to do with genetics, too. If you're ambidextrous, are you bisexual? I guess so. Where's that study?

That makes sense. So I did a little more digging in this, but I don't understand it at all. But more recently, as in just a couple of years ago, they think they found an actual physiological, biological explanation for that. Did you understand that? I don't know if they found it

or if somebody made it up and everybody's like, all right, that'll do for now. I read a bunch of papers that said, they think this may be it. Okay. But I didn't get it. So what they think is that when a mom carries a boy, when a mom carries a boy, her body has a reaction

to the male proteins, the stuff that makes him a male creates an allergic reaction of sorts in the mom and the mom produces antibodies. The first time the mom's body is totally caught off guard has basically no effects whatsoever on the boy's development as a boy. As more and more boys are born and gestate in that same poor mom,

the antibodies get better and better at recognizing these proteins and can actually get to the point where they affect the expression of these proteins. And so what makes the boy straight from the basis of these proteins is actually affected and they develop differently starting in the womb because the mom has developed antibodies

to basically maleness, which is the most mind-boggling, amazing idea I've ever heard. That summary was so much better than the scientific paper summaries that I read today. Thank you, Chuck. Good job. Thank you. You should do that.

Thank you. I do for a living. I just did. Well, that's a good point. I thought this was interesting too. I mean, we've kind of gone over most of these birth order theories, I think in general, but this one I don't think we super touched on

and I think is really interesting, the confluence theory. So this is sort of like resource dilution of parents that we were talking about, like only so much emotional support or financial support to go around, but this takes it down to the sibling level. And it's sort of basically like if you were first born, you are then have a degraded emotional environment

and intellectual environment once you get a younger. So it's like playing tennis against better or worse competition. If you're the better tennis player, you're not going to play as good against a lesser tennis player. And they're saying that that kind of happens with firstborns because they have to spend time

with this dumb kid, this dumb baby. But the dumb baby gets the leg up. Exactly. That's when you play tennis against someone better than you. Right. Eventually that's called the Tudor Effect. They surpassed that firstborn. The student becomes the master.

That's right. Exactly. And your skin turns to alabaster. Really interesting. It's that sting. Is that sting? Well, the police. Oh, okay.

Oh, sure. I thought you were like a dream of the blue turtle sting. No, I'm more of a nothing like the sun. Yes, synchronicity. No, that's good too. I'm still mad at them for that reunion tour. Oh yeah, they really phoned it in, you said, right? Just phoned it in.

Hey, I saw for some, so I just thought of the police and then Stuart Copeland, which made me think of Les Claypool. Remember he was in that band with Les Claypool and Trey Anastasio? Yeah, it's called Kill Me. No, it's three talented individuals. But then that made me think of Les Claypool,

who was in a documentary I just saw on the residence. Have you seen it? No, the residents were the mystery band, right? That were the big ping pong heads? Eyeballs. Eyeballs, right. Still are a mystery band, still going. Really?

Yeah, they're good. But it's good. It's like it's a intellectual kind of like examination of their history and everything, but it's really interesting, but Les Claypool's in it. Do you think when Les Claypool, Fish Guy, what's his name? Trey Anastasio. Trey Anastasio.

And Stuart Copeland. And Stuart Copeland. You think when they got together to form that band, all they did was just sort of work out whose solo is next? Probably. It's like, I want to do the bass solo first, and then we can go right into the guitar solo,

then the drum solo, and then the song's over. Hopefully the birth order of the three worked out so that they were like, yes, this all makes sense to me. Oh man, there's nothing better than old videos of Stuart Copeland pitching fits. Oh, did he? I always heard it was Sting that was the jerk to Stuart Copeland.

Was Stuart Copeland the jerk? Well, Stuart Copeland was a hothead, and Sting could poke his buttons. Oh. Yeah, it's pretty fun. Of course, Stuart Copeland. No, don't feel bad for Stuart Copeland. Man, I think he might be the best drummer ever lived.

Everybody says Neil Pert. I don't know, man. Stuart Copeland was pretty good. Oh, yeah. And like crazy, like doing his own thing. And he's from Macon. What? Yeah.

Macon, Georgia? Macon, Georgia. Wow. I didn't know that. This concludes this episode of Stuff You Should Know. If you want to know more about birth order, go talk to your family. We don't care.

Since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Did you watch the Motley Crew movie yet on Netflix? No. No, I didn't know it was out. Yeah, it's out. OK. Is it good? No, but it's not good.

But it's great, you know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, it's based on the book. OK. But it's so, I mean, it feels like one of those VH1. Are you literally making a note? I can't wait to see it. It's sort of like one of those VH1 music movies.

OK. Like the Jackson's one. It's good. OK, I'll check it out. All right. Who plays Vince Neil? They're all, you know, the only one of the, not the only thing. There's a lot of distracting parts.

But the guy who plays Vince Neil in his hair looks a lot like Garth. Looks a lot like Dana Carvey as Garth. So it's kind of hard to fully go there. The guy who played Tommy Lee is pretty good. Was it Christian Navarro? No, did he want to? He can't play Tommy Lee.

He could. Tommy Lee's like 6'5". That kid can play anybody. Well, no, I agree. All right, it's time for Listener Mail. I said check. Navarro's more of Mick Marr's guy. OK.

All right, here we go. Is that from, is that Dockin? No, Mick Marr's is Motley Crue. Who is that? He's a guitar player. Oh. The old creep. Yeah, yeah, sure.

I know who you're talking about. I guess I never knew his name. By creep, he was a creep. He was creepy. Sure. That's what I mean. Still is. All right, here we go.

This is from Sam. I'm just going to call this heartfelt. It's always nice to hear this. Hey, guys, probably could have sent this a million times, but tonight I really felt the need to. You were with me when I transitioned from high school to college. You were there the night my dad died two years ago.

And now you're here as I'm in the process of dealing with my girlfriend dumping me up to three years. You're always there, guys. I'm sure you hear this all the time, but I want to tell you that some tough days, on tough days, you really help keep me sane, plain and simple. You help keep me sane, plain and simple. Not that we keep him plain and simple.

I read that wrong. That's like eat shoots and leaves. That's right. I have depression and anxiety, and the podcast is a huge help on nights like this, when nothing seems to help or is comforting. I can tell if things get really bad if even the podcast doesn't help.

You guys have also been like role models for me. So this is all just to say thank you so much, guys. Who knows how much darker some spots in my life have been without you. Could say much more, but I think I got the message across. That is from Sam. And he says, PS, I am a he-him. And I spanked this email on the bottom.

Oh, good. That's how it got here. That's right. Nice work. If you want to get in touch with us like Sam did, thank you very much, Sam. By the way, that was very sweet of you to tell us all that. Hope you're pulling through.

Yeah, hang in there, man. You can get in touch with us by going to stuffyoushouldknow.com and clicking on our social links. And you can also send us an email like Sam did. Don't forget to spank it on the bottom to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.