Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

Sibling Personality

Sibling Personality

Sibling personality is another world from only child personality.

I think, siblings simply have more impact than we might think.

After-all, an only child spends 100% of their time at home watching and learning from adults.

But with a few siblings in the picture, only a fraction of what is heard, seen, and learned is coming from an adult or parent.

Niche picking might help to make sense of this mystery. This concept has its roots in the work of the physician and psychotherapist Alfred Adler, who came to believe that Sigmund Freud’s emphasis on parenting failed to account for the critical influence of siblings on personality development. Adler argued that because firstborn children start life as only children, they initially identify with their parents. When a younger sibling arrives, firstborns risk being “dethroned” and often respond by emulating their parents: they enforce rules and assert their authority over the younger sibling, which sets the stage for the younger child to rebel.

-Adam Grant, Originals

Stealing Bases In Baseball Is Correlated With This

Stealing Bases In Baseball Is Correlated With This

Stealing bases in baseball is correlated with this one thing.

Being a younger sibling.

Of course, this sounds crazy. But the intuition makes sense.

In short, younger siblings are simply more likely to take risks.

But this fact is not only true in baseball. It is true in the type of sport chosen to begin with and in nearly every other area of life.

The point is that if you need a rebel on your side, pick a younger sibling.

But if you come from, or have, a big family, you already knew that – didn’t you?

Aiming to determine why some baseball players steal more bases than others, historian of science Frank Sulloway and psychologist Richard Zweigenhaft did something clever. They identified more than four hundred brothers who played professional baseball, which enabled them to compare individuals from the same families, who shared half their DNA and had similar upbringings. Their results revealed a striking fact: birth order predicted which brother tried to steal more bases. Younger brothers were 10.6 times more likely than their older siblings to attempt to steal a base.

-Adam Grant, Originals

This it me later: This idea also has a persuasive component to it.

If you want someone at work or school or whatever to accept your new idea, look for someone with older siblings.

They are much more likely, on average, to accept upending innovations.

Sterling Terrell