Birth order has little impact on personality

First borns are supposedly perfectionists while middle children develop a talent for diplomacy

Whether you become a perfectionist or a rebel has very little to do with your birth position in the family, says a new study.

"We found no substantial effects of birth order on any of the personality dimensions we examined," said one of the researchers, Stefan Schmukle from Leipzig University in Germany.

This does not only contradict prominent psychological theories, but also goes against the intuition of many people,” Schmukle pointed out.

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The question of whether a person's position among siblings has a lasting impact on personality has occupied scientists for more than 100 years, the study said.

Lay people as well as a scientist share a number of beliefs: First borns are supposedly perfectionists, for example, while middle children develop a talent for diplomacy and last borns are expected to be rebellious.

To find out whether these differences actually exist, the researchers analysed the data of more than 20,000 grown-ups from Germany, Britain and the US.

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They found that central personality traits such as extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness and conscientiousness are not affected by birth-order position.

Small effects of birth positions were, however, found regarding self-reported intellect.

First borns were more likely to report a rich vocabulary and less difficulty understanding abstract ideas.

"This effect on intelligence replicates very well in large samples, but it is barely meaningful on the individual level, because it is extremely small,” Schnukle explained.

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).