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Personality and Birth Order: Explaining the Differences Between Siblings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Judith Rich Harris
Judith Rich Harris*
Affiliation:
Middletown, New Jersey, USA
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What struck me most forcefully in Townsend's critique (this issue) was a pattern he observed: A large preponderance of the changes he documented in Sulloway's numeric or graphic descriptions of data resulted in improvements. The later data point was almost always a better fit to Sulloway's predictions than the earlier one. Townsend suggested that further analysis would be appropriate, which made me wonder why he stopped where he did, without doing any statistical tests on his findings. A possible next step would be to calculate the likelihood that the observed proportion of changes in the confirming direction occurred by chance alone.

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Type
Roundtable Commentaries
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Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , September 2000, pp. 160 - 163
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

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