Why
are individuals from the same family often no more similar in personality
than those from different families? Why, within the same family,
do some children conform to authority whereas others rebel? The family,
it turns out, is not a
"shared environment" but rather a set of niches that provide siblings
with different outlooks.
At
the heart of this pioneering inquiry into human development is a fundamental
insight: that the personalities of siblings vary because they adopt different
strategies in the universal quest for parental favor. Frank J. Sulloway's
most important finding is that eldest children identify with parents and
authority, and support the status quo, whereas younger children rebel against
it. Drawing on the work of Darwin and the new sciences of evolutionary
psychology, he transforms our understanding of personality development
and its origins in family dynamics.
Most
persuasively, Sulloway's findings offer conclusive evidence that the family,
with its powerful interpersonal dynamics, is a cauldron for the great revolutionary
advances that drive historical change. Through his analysis of revolutions
in social and scientific thought, from the Reformation to Darwin's theory
of natural selection, Sulloway
demonstrates that the primary engine of history is located within
families, not between them, as Marx believed.
This
landmark work illuminates the crucial influence that family niches have
on personality, and documents the profound consequences of sibling competition--not
only on individual development within the family, but on society as a whole.
Born to Rebel's path-breaking insights promise to revolutionize
the nature of psychological, sociological, and historical inquiry.
From the Random House book jacket of Born
to Rebel
FRANK J. SULLOWAY, Ph.D.
Photo by: John Hunter Mottern
FRANK J. SULLOWAY is a Research Scholar at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Program in Science,
Technology, and Society. He has a Ph.D. in the history of science
from Harvard University and is a former MacArthur Fellow. His previous
book, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, provides a radical reanalysis
of the origins and validity of Freud's theories and received the Pfizer
Award of the History of Science Society. Sulloway has written extensively
on the life and ideas of Charles Darwin as well as on the nature of scientific
creativity. For the last two decades, he has employed evolutionary
theory to understand how family dynamics affect personality development,
including that of creative geniuses. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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