Birth Order and Civil Disobedience: A Test of Sulloway's “Born to Rebel” Hypothesis

In Born to Rebel, F. Sulloway (1996) argued that, throughout history, later-borns have been more likely than first-borns to challenge the status quo. The authors tested Sulloway's hypothesis among a group of U.S. college students who had participated in civil disobedience as part of a labor dispute. The authors predicted that there would be a higher percentage of later-borns among those who had been arrested than among a group of their friends who had not participated in civil disobedience or among a control group of students drawn from classes at the college. The findings, in fact, revealed a significant relationship between the number of times the students had been arrested and birth order.