The middle child myth: studies say birth order has little impact on personality
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Version 0 of 1. Blaming your problems on being a middle child might no longer work. Theories about the link between birth order and personality have been hotly debated for years, but several recent studies report that birth order has little to with personality development. According to long-believed evolutionary models, siblings compete for parental attention. First-born children are thought to be more responsible and dominating, and concerned with pleasing parents, while children born later are thought to be more “rebellious”, original and sociable. But a study published this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences attempts to debunk these ideas. Researchers from the University of Leipzig and Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, both in Germany, studied more than 20,000 adults from the US, UK and Germany to compare siblings within the same families and people within the same birth order across families. “We found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination,” the researchers wrote. Another study from the Journal of Research in Personality looked at 377,000 high school students in the US to test associations between birth order and personality and intelligence, and also found scant evidence for personality differences. Researchers looked at the Big Five personality traits, which include openness, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness and extraversion, and found that first-born children tend to be more conscientious and dominant, and less sociable, which fits the stereotype. However, they found the same children are more agreeable and less neurotic, which goes against the stereotype. The idea goes back most prominently to a debate between Sigmund Freud and his colleague Alfred Adler. Adler argued that first and last-born children struggle constantly for success and superiority, while middle children are healthier and more easy going. Freud, a firstborn child, disagreed and the debate ended in Adler resigning from the Psychoanalytic Society and starting the Society for Individual Psychology. Firstborn children have traditionally been thought of as more intelligent than children born later, and while the second study found that firstborns have an advantage, it was only by one IQ point. “We would have to say that, to the extent that these effect sizes are accurate estimates of the true effect, birth order does not seem to be an important consideration for understanding either the development of personality traits or the development of intelligence in the between-family context,” the researchers wrote. |