Scientists confirm: First-born siblings have HIGHER IQs than their brothers and sisters!
Three separate studies have confirmed what your big brother and sister have always known...
By Frances Sheen
April 10 2019
If you’re the eldest sibling in the family, we know you've ALWAYS known this but you are officially cleverer than your siblings - and it's FACT thanks to three separate scientific studies.
The first study, printed in the journal, Science, analysed the IQs of nearly 250,000 Norwegian 18 and 19-year-olds and discovered that older siblings had higher scores than younger siblings.
Ouch.
A second study, by the same authors but published in the journal Intelligence, looked at more than 100,000 Norwegian brothers and found that first-borns on average had an IQ 2.3 points higher than their younger brothers!
“These are probably the two most important studies on birth order and intelligence in the last 75 years,” said psychologist Frank Sulloway of the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote an analysis of the work.
But it’s not going to do much for sibling rivalry, right?
And thirdly, research by academics at the University of Illinois studied 377,000 high school kids to see how the family birth order affects their lives.
The results, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, found that while the eldest in the family DID have a higher IQ, they also tended to be more outgoing, agreeable and conscientious.
Double ouch.
So what can we learn from all this?
Well, while we’re not sure it will make a HUGE amount of difference to day-to-day life, it does give the eldest sibling bragging rights when it comes to family dinners and arguments.
And sometimes that’s all you need, right?
