The Family Environment of “Quick-Witted” Persons: Birth Order, Family Communication Patterns, and Creative Facility

Abstract

“Creative facility” refers to the ease, rapidity, or fluency with which people are able to formulate and produce novel, appropriate messages. Previous research indicates that people differ in this regard and that the phenomenon is linked to various personality and cognitive-style variables. This study aims to investigate whether aspects of family structure (i.e., birth order) and family processes (i.e., family communication patterns) are related to creative facility. Results indicated a significant interaction between birth order and family conversation orientation such that, for first-borns, higher levels of conversation orientation were associated with slower message production. No effects were observed for family conformity orientation. Among the implications of the findings is the need to assess birth order in studies of family communication patterns.

Keywords:

• Birth Order
• Communication Skill
• Creative Facility
• Family Communication Patterns
• Message Production

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of Kristen Bredesen, Katie Beck, and Lauren E. Herbers in the analysis of the data reported in this study.

Notes

1. The concept of creative facility gives emphasis to three the features of message behavior: (a) novelty, (b) appropriateness (see Greene et al., 2010, Note 1), and (c) fluency. Regarding the last, it has long been recognized that more rapid verbal response rates are associated with ratings of credibility and social attractiveness (see Greene, 2016). Moreover, message-production speed is a reliable and valid index of the course of communication-skill acquisition (see Greene, 2003).

2. Six subjects were excluded from analysis because, despite the study sign-up instructions stipulating that participants had to be native-English speakers, they were not. Also, following standard practice in dealing with timed responses (see Bargh & Chartrand, 2000), 4 participants were dropped from analysis because their mean message-production time for one or more of the three trial types was more than three standard deviations above the mean for that trial type.

3. The results of these analyses are available from the corresponding author on request.

4. The results of these analyses are available from the corresponding author on request.

5. Greene et al. (2014) did not assess birth order, but the S-A-B trial-types and items they used are the same as those employed in the current study.

6. The differences between the two studies are not surprising. Numerous statisticians over the years have noted that the probability of replicating a statistically significant finding in a second study are considerably smaller than one might suppose. Goodman (1992) shows that, with a true population effect, given a study that produced a significant difference at p = .05, the probability of a second study also producing a significant effect is only .50 (for a first-study effect at p = .01, the probability for a similar effect in a second study is .73, that is, a better than one-in-four chance that the second study will not produce a statistically significant difference (see also: Greenland et al., 2016; Schmidt, 1992).