Book Review

Born to Rebel: Birth order, family dynamics, and creative lives

N Engl J Med 1997; 336:968March 27, 1997

Article

Born to Rebel: Birth order, family dynamics, and creative lives
By Frank J. Sulloway. 653 pp., illustrated. New York, Pantheon Books, 1996. $30. ISBN: 0-679-44232-4

Those who hold the reins of power commonly regard underdogs with apprehension. Politicians keep a wary eye on the generally liberal women's vote and wonder nervously whether working class resistance will crystallize into revolution. In Born to Rebel, Frank Sulloway argues that the primary source of such rebelliousness lies within each family, where it is generated by the formative dynamics of sibling birth order.

Sulloway's basic premise is that firstborn children tend to identify strongly with their parents and usually employ a strategy of emulation and obedience to gain parental attention. Children born later must find other ways of attracting that attention. Success depends on being different from older siblings, a requirement that demands ever greater creativity as the number of siblings grows. This intrafamilial jostling tends to produce firstborn children who are conservative and respectful of authority, while the position of those born later promotes openness to experience and change and acts as a training ground for rebelliousness.

Sulloway stresses, however, that although birth order predisposes a child to conservatism or rebelliousness, it does not dictate what path his or her life will take. Among the many influences that crowd a child's life, he argues, birth order is the most important, but it is never determining. He shows how other factors, such as sex, class, race, temperament, conflict with parents, and age gaps between siblings, interact with the effects of birth order, sometimes reducing and sometimes amplifying them.

These general effects of birth order were established through statistical analyses of biographical information gathered for 6566 people. This information is coded on the basis of 256 variables detailed in 1 of 11 appendixes in the book. The results are summarized throughout the text in simple, readable graphs. Biographical sketches of well-known historical figures, among whom Darwin, Wallace, Galileo, Copernicus, Mendel, and Voltaire figure prominently, are used to illustrate the general effect of birth order on the lives of individual people.

Sulloway's background as a historian of evolutionary theory, and of Darwin in particular, is much in evidence. He argues that birth-order conflict can be understood as natural selection writ small. To survive, siblings must diversify into unique family niches, a process analogous to species diversifying to occupy unique ecologic niches. He uses the way Darwinian evolution gradually gained popular credence and respectability as his primary example of how birth order influences such processes. Darwin's family life and history serve to illustrate how the compounding effect of the youngest son of the youngest son over several generations can produce a truly exceptional person. Sulloway locates himself firmly within the Stephen J. Gould school, which sees Darwin as a historian and environmentalist rather than as the genetic determinist of contemporary sociobiology.

In the effects of familial birth order, Sulloway identifies the elusive Holy Grail of anthropologists and historians — a social mechanism that joins broad social forces with individual behavior and generates both social stasis and change. The weaving of statistics, individuals, family biographies, and scientific and political revolutions provides explicit examples of how birth order influences societies and directs change, particularly when circumstances conspire to compound the effects of birth order at an individual or demographic level. However, Sulloway's failure to provide information on the composition of his sample according to sex, race, or class denies the reader the opportunity to assess his treatment of these variables. To be included in Sulloway's analysis, a person had to leave recorded opinions about the scientific and political debates of the time, so we must assume that the sample is dominated by well-educated white men and treat with caution conclusions about how sex, class, and race interact with birth order. Sulloway's insights are potentially revolutionary but require wider exploration to be fully convincing.

Yvonne Marshall, Ph.D.
University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom