Birth Order Has No Effect on Intelligence, Personality: Major Study

Likewise, just because you are the youngest doesn’t mean you’ll be looking for the most attention. At least, the study says, not enough to make any practical difference.

“This is a conspicuously large sample size”, said lead author Brent Roberts in the Department of Psychology from the University of Illinois. “You are not going to be able to see it with the naked eye”. They can also give each child individual attention, encourage teamwork, refuse to hold up one child as a role model for the others, and avoid favoritism.

Nope, says a massive new study analyzing the traits of 377,000 high school students. But, unlike many studies that look within a particular family unit to judge how birth order affects children, this study compared kids to the entire sample to get a broader view.

First-borns tended to be more extroverted, agreeable and conscientious, and had less anxiety than later-borns, for example – but those differences were ‘infinitesimally small, ‘ amounting to a correlation of 0.02, Roberts said.

But the correlation on those personality differences is so tiny that it really doesn’t speak to any noticeable effect between individuals born first and those born later.

The notion that birth order can determine a lot about your personality stems from the work of Alfred W. Adler, a onetime colleague of Sigmund Freud.

Professor Damian advices parents not to allow birth order to dictated their parenting approach because this order is not meaningfully related to their kid’s personality traits and IQ levels.

Rodica Damian, project co-leader and psychology professor over at the University of Houston, gave a statement of her own informing why previous studies on the subject had a flawed approach.

According to Roberts, “another major problem with within-family studies is that the oldest child is always older”.

The analysis is reported] in the Journal of Research in Personality. Researchers also examined a subset of participants for their study consisting of children who lived with families of two siblings, and two parents. The sibling bond is often complicated and is known to be influenced by factors such as parental treatment, birth order, personality, and people and experiences outside the family. The team was then able to look more in-depth at personality and IQ changes between first- and second-borns, or second- and third-borns.

The findings confirmed those seen in the larger study, with specific differences between the oldest and a second child, and between second and third children.