Resolving Controversy Over Birth Order and Personality: By Debate or By Design?

Abstract

The notion that birth order bears a systematic relation to personality was commonly thought to have succumbed to the formidable attack from Ernst and Angst (1983). The 1996 publication of Frank Sulloway's book Born to Rebel, however, breathed new life into a proposition that most social scientists thought was a dead horse. In response to the book, Townsend (this issue) insists that Sulloway's extraordinary measures to revive this dead horse were unwarranted. Apparently fearing that too many readers have taken the book seriously, Townsend attacks both the contemporary and historical evidence offered by Sulloway.