Birth Order And Personality: Does Sibling Rank Influence Life Course?

Does birth order affect personality traits? Science says no.

New findings published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) looked at the "big five" personality traits, including agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, emotional stability and openness to experience and found that these were not affected by birth order. However, they did discover that firstborn children were slightly more likely to report a rich vocabulary and less difficulty understanding abstract ideas.

During the study, researchers analyzed data from over 20,000 adults from Germany, the United States and Great Britain.

While the findings did reveal that firstborns held higher scores in terms of intelligence, researchers believe that this likely has nothing to do with birth order--but can be traced to longer social family interaction.

"This effect on intelligence replicates very well in large samples, but it is barely meaningful on the individual level, because it is extremely small. And even though mean scores on intelligence decline, in four out of ten cases the later-born is still smarter than his or her older sibling," said researcher Stefan Schmukle, in a news release. "The real news of our study is that we found no substantial effects of birth order on any of the personality dimensions we examined. This does not only contradict prominent psychological theories, but also goes against the intuition of many people."

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