Examining the effects of birth order on personality.
This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person's position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person's life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to later-borns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality has not yet resulted in conclusive findings. We used data from three large national panels from the United States (n = 5,240), Great Britain (n = 4,489), and Germany (n = 10,457) to resolve this open research question. This database allowed us to identify even very small effects of birth order on personality with sufficiently high statistical power and to investigate whether effects emerge across different samples. We furthermore used two different analytical strategies by comparing siblings with different birth-order positions (i) within the same family (within-family design) and (ii) between different families (between-family design). In our analyses, we confirmed the expected birth-order effect on intelligence. We also observed a significant decline of a 10th of a SD in self-reported intellect with increasing birth-order position, and this effect persisted after controlling for objectively measured intelligence. Most important, however, we consistently found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination. On the basis of the high statistical power and the consistent results across samples and analytical designs, we must conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain.
['Rohrer|Julia M|JM|', 'Egloff|Boris|B|http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5736-9912', 'Schmukle|Stefan C|SC|']
D000293:Adolescent D000328:Adult D000368:Aged D000369:Aged, 80 and over D016208:Databases, Factual D005260:Female D005500:Follow-Up Studies D005858:Germany D006801:Humans D008297:Male D008875:Middle Aged D036801:Parturition D010551:Personality D035781:Siblings D006113:United Kingdom D014481:United States
birth order personality siblings Big Five within-family analyses