Parent-Offspring Conflict and Revolutionary Personality: Exploring Birth Order Dynamics
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In science, high levels of parental conflict predict openness to innovation. As part of the firstborn niche, eldest children tend to identify with parents, who generally favour them in return. Conflict disrupts the usual repertoire of firstborn strategies, causing some firstborns to behave like laterborns. High levels of parent-offspring conflict make laterborns somewhat more radical than they would otherwise have been, but the effect is significantly smaller than it is for first borns. Who needs to have Attila the Hun for a father or the Wicked Witch of the West for a mother, if you already have a domineering older sibling?
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Birth order contributes substantially more to revolutionary personality than does parent-offspring conflict. Comparing the two variables directly, birth order is more than twice as important. This finding is surprising from a psychoanalytic point of view. Psychohistory is largely based on Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex. Conflict with parents does play an important role in personality development, as Freud believed, but parent-offspring conflict is not typically sex linked, as Freud also claimed. Freud convinced himself that children harbor murderous wishes against the same-sex parent. For a young child to kill a parent is tantamount to committing evolutionary suicide from the Darwinian point of view. To wish to kill a parent, if one never acts on this wish, is a blatant waste of time. Owing to natural selection, Freudian genes coding for patricidal wishes would soon vanish from any population.
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As a test of Freud’s claims, I have analyzed the life of a few scientists for their levels of conflict with each of their parent. Contrary to the psychoanalytic expectation, offspring experienced just as much conflict with their mothers as they did with their fathers. In addition, both sources of conflict contribute equally to scientific radicalism. Parent-offspring conflict and openness to experience have a reciprocal relationship. Just as conflict with a parent tends to induce greater openness the degree of independence and regulates parent-offspring conflict. It is noteworthy that parent-offspring conflict is minimized when firstborns adopt a “closed” or conforming intellectual style and laterborns adopt a moderately “open” or independent style. When both siblings adopt the same style, parent-offspring conflict increases. It is also noteworthy that the price of independence is different for firstborns and laterborns. Parents tolerate independent thinking among their laterborn offspring. The same level of independence in a firstborn is associated with significantly greater parental conflict. In short, individuals who occupy a favoured niche seem to pay a higher price for asserting their independence.
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Based on these findings about parental conflict, a biographical rule of thumb itself, whenever one encounters a firstborn radical (and family life does occasionally produce them), such individuals are likely to have experienced substantial conflict with a parent. Parent-offspring conflict makes honorary laterborns out of some firstborns. The tendency for firstborns to adopt laterborn strategies is most common in lower-class families. Children are more likely to accept parental authority in the upper and middle classes. When parents are impoverished, they provide less reason for emulation. Under such circumstances, firstborns are sometimes pressured to invest in their younger siblings at the expense of their own reproductive potential. Such pressures deny them the usual advantages that stem from their firstborn niche. The value of family niches is always relative to the investment capabilities of the parents.
