Who's the number one son?

摘要

In 1874 Francis Galton, a British polymath, analysed a sample of English scientists and found the vast majority to be first-born sons. This led him to speculate that firstborn children enjoyed a special level of attention from their parents that allowed them to thrive intellectually. Half a century later Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychologist, made a similar argument relating to personality. First-born children, he thought, were more conscientious, while the later-born were more extrovert and emotionally stable. Many subsequent studies have explored these ideas, but their findings have been equivocal-some supporting and some rejecting them. Now a team led by Stefan Schmukle of the University of Leipzig, in Germany, has collected the most comprehensive evidence on the matter yet. Its conclusion, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that Adler was wrong, but Galton may have been right.