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.
_archivos/sulloway.jpg)
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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