BIRTH ORDER AND ARTISTIC CREATIVITYl

Alfred Adler IS believed to have first presented his views on birth order in 1918 (2, p. 382). With regard to the first born, Adler held that he is typically more conservative than his later-born siblings, due to the first born's being dethroned by the second child, from his position of the little king of the family. Recent research in the field of specific personality patterns for the various birth-order positions tends to confirm Adler's view. In a session devoted to birth order at the 1963 American Psychological Association, Dember (3) reported that first-born subjects scored much higher on a projective measure of need affiliation~an indIcation of needing to be with others in conformity; Weiss, Wolf and Wiltsey (I I) reported that first borns ranked participation in a group experiment as more favorable than did middle or only children; Hall and Barger (5) reported that the first born had tendencies toward seriousness, conservatism, and organizing activities; and Altus (I), taking a page out of Adler for his hypothesis, found that first borns scored higher on a scale derived from the MMPI that measured an orientation toward the status quo. Previously, in 1959, Schachter (8) had hypothesized that first-born children receive more inconsistent nurturance than later-born, and therefore exhibit more dependency behavior in the form of affiliative responses. The researches following upon Schachter's, and indicating that first-born subjects display more conforming behavior, include that of Ehrlich (4) who found that first-born subjects would more readily change their opinions to conform to fictitious group norms, and the study by Staples and Walters (9) which showed first-born subjects to be more susceptible to social influence. Regarding the interpretation of such results we should like to call attention to Adler's understanding of the operation of birth order as a factor. In the words of Ruth Munroe, "Adler's point was not that order of birth is in itself important but that the place of the child in the family introduces fairly definable problems which ... tend to call forth certain characteristic kinds of solution" (7, p. 357).