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A recent study of the link between birth order and personality showed that there is really no link at all. “As close to zero as you can get,” the .

All those birth-order explanations about your first child’s neuroses, your second’s troublemaking and the space-cadet lackadaisicalness of your third? Well, science says baloney.

Will ordinary people accept the new birth order science? I doubt it. Later you will see why.

But this resistance will be low-key, under-the-radar and no big deal because resisting science is common and understandable.

Resistance to Covid-19 science has been of course the opposite — public, nasty, polarizing and uncommon. Resistance with a vengeance.

Though Covid resistance and birth order resistance are on opposite ends of the spectrum for sure, together they highlight two key characteristics about science and the public.

The first applies generally. Resisting science is really widespread. It’s not just crackpots, ignoramuses and public clamor.

Second, the term “follow the science,” which was used all the time with Covid, should just go away because the term is simplistic, misleading sloganeering. It puts scientists on a pedestal in ways that are counter to how good science works.

“The confidence people place in science is frequently based not on what it really is, but on what people would like it to be,” says Liv Grjebine, .

“A majority of Americans trust science as long as it does not challenge their existing beliefs.”

Close to 60% of North Americans say that if science-based information is contrary to their religious beliefs, they follow their religion.

The link between birth order and personality has become conventional wisdom, by now a mix of traditional beliefs and a gloss of Freudian psychology that made the idea fit even more comfortably into our cultural breadbasket.

Even Disney, the biggest pop cultural kahuna of all, , modernizing Donald Duck’s triplet nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie by giving each his own distinctive personality roughly based on their minutes-apart birth order.

Scientifically valid or not, birth order is a quick and easy way to try to cope with a troublesome, complex issue. And what’s more complex than a family?

There are dozens of lists of one-word, cue-card-like guides to birth order personality links, like “first born: bossy.” 

My brother caused so much trouble in Hebrew school that his teacher resorted to extreme hyperbole, telling my mother that dealing with him was worse than living in a concentration camp. 

My brother was the middle child and therefore mischievous. Of course, that’s simplistic. Nevertheless, as the use of those cue cards showed, for parents trying to control their meandering offspring, any port in a storm.

Family stories, one of the main perpetuators of culture, need tools like birth order theory. Stories people tell about their families are not so much about accuracy. They are more like myths and folk tales, even parables.

In short, they are oral histories keeping old memories alive and passing them on.

The stories get polished, which means simplified over time. Accuracy or complexity is not the main goal. Moral messages and solidarity — passing the torch and learning lessons — is.

Often these stories make people laugh. Laughter because it is such a powerful signal of agreement, affiliation and affection.

That story about my brother will always be part of family lore, never mind that he went on to serve in the Peace Corps, got a doctorate in sociology, raised a family and had a successful career.

When my mother was deep into dementia, my brother’s Hebrew school antics were one of her very last memories. “That I’ll never forget,” she said with a small smile on her face.

Some things are more important than the whole unvarnished truth. So, we varnish. 

Birth order resistance is an example of a way that people often react to science. This kind of resistance is so much a part of ordinary life. Doubting what scientists tell us? No big deal.

This low-key doubting avoids a basic paradox about science that showed up big time during the pandemic and ratcheted up the resistance and conflict.

The paradox, as Liv Grjebine points out, is that science is not about certainty at all. Good science depends on doubt, always questioning, always re-examining the findings.

“Doubt,” Grjebine says, “is a feature of science, not a bug.” 

But doubt does not create trust, especially when the chips are really down. Even though people resist science all the time, there are other times when they demand that science be absolutely definitive even though those are the very times when science can’t be.

Scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci at times exaggerated the certainty of their information and downplayed the limits. 

Mask mandates, closing the schools and handwashing were all based on sketchy evidence, but all expressed with less doubt than they deserved. “That’s what we know for now” was replaced by “That’s what we know.”

They assumed the public wasn’t ready for this view of science, and they were probably right.

Of course, much of the resistance with a vengeance emanated from manipulative politicians and crackpot conspiracy theories. Once it became a polarizing political issue, all bets were off.

But some of this resistance came from all sides of the public’s exaggerated belief in science’s certainty. 

“Follow the science” morphed from an instruction to an overconfident virtue-signaling cudgel with no room for the kind of doubt that science thrives on. The phrase “Follow the science” is a badge of this misunderstanding, just as is blaming Dr. Fauci for everything that went wrong.

Using the phrase became a smug way to dismiss critics as anti-scientific even though in retrospect the science to be followed was more tentative than the “follow” advocates themselves understood.

In comparison, the quiet resistance to birth-order research turns out to be a realistic, useful model for the link between science and the public. No drama, no inflated expectations about the powers of science. Just a healthy skepticism based on everyday experiences.

Of course, it is dramatically harder to act this way in a pandemic. But in preparing for the next pandemic both scientists and the rest of us need to recognize that it’s not just about managing the disease.

It’s also about managing expectations and being candid about the limits of scientific information.

It won’t kill you to put more doubt into your life.