Since thetime of Freud , psychologists have been devoted to nailing down how exactly our nascency ordination affect our liveliness , arguing that immature kid aremore rebelliousormore agreeableor that honest-to-god fry are moreconscientiousorsmarter . But there are a lot of confuse factors when it comes to subject area of sibling dynamics , including family income and parental education , whether you ’re the immature of two or five sibling , or whether you have an older brother versus anolder sister .
According to a novel , unusually prominent cogitation of sibling relationship by psychologist from the University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign , whether you are an older or unseasoned sibling has almost no effect on your personality or intelligence . The work , published in theJournal of Research in Personality , analyzed a nationally representative sample of 377,000 gamy schooltime students using data from a longitudinal study that begin in 1960 . The researcher account that personality differences between firstborn and laterborn siblings may survive , but they are almost minute .
There was some evidence for associations between one-time fry being more or less more extroverted and scrupulous , but the differences were slim . There was only a minuscule advantage—“almost imperceptible”—in footing of IQ for first born minor . However , in comparison to other factors related to personality and intelligence traits , such as family income , the gist were scantily noticeable . The researchers drop a line that “ the attention given to the function of birthing order on personality is , at best , disproportionate to its importance to the ontogeny of personality differences among siblings across families . ”
The study had several limitation , including that it was based on ego - reported personality trait , rather than observed ones , and that it did n’t control for large age gaps between siblings ( growing up with an older sib who ’s already out of the house is a different environment than a sibling only a few old age older ) . However , given that this is one of the large studies of its kind , it ’s potential to be slightly more authentic than past research that set up significant personality conflict among only afew hundredor a thousand subject .
