[9급 국가직 영어 2013년 18번]

It's long been part of folk wisdom that birth order strongly affects personality, intelligence and achievement. However, most of the research claiming that firstborns are radically different from other children has been discredited, and it now seems that any effects of birth order on intelligence or personality will likely be washed out by all the other influences in a person's life. In fact, the belief in the permanent impact of birth order, according to Toni Falbo, a social psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, comes from the psychological theory that your personality is fixed by the time you're six. That assumption simply is incorrect. The better, later and larger studies are less likely to find birth order a useful predictor of anything. When two Swiss social scientists, Cecile Ernst and Jules Angst, reviewed 1,500 studies a few years ago they concluded that "birth order differences in personality are nonexistent in our sample. In particular, there is no evidence for a firstborn personality."