Examining the effects of birth order on personality

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Big Five; birth order; personality; siblings; within-family analyses.

Fig. 1.

Effects of birth order position and sibship size on personality and intelligence. Mean scores and 95% confidence intervals are displayed for intelligence (A) and personality (B–H), depending on sibship size and birth-order position in the combined between-family sample that included the NCDS, NLSY, and SOEP participants. Personality variables were standardized as T-scores with a mean of 50 and SD of 10; intelligence was standardized as an IQ score with a mean of 100 and SD of 15. Birth-order effects were significant for intelligence, openness to experience, and intellect (Table 1). (B–H) Personality traits were as follows: extraversion (B), emotional stability (C), agreeableness (D), conscientiousness (E), openness to experience (F), imagination (G), and intellect (H).

Fig. 2.

Effects of birth-order position and sibship size on personality and intelligence. Predicted mean scores from fixed-effects regressions and 95% confidence intervals are displayed for intelligence (A) and personality (B–H) depending on sibship size and birth-order position in the combined within-family sample that included the NLSY and SOEP participants. Birth-order effects were significant for intelligence and intellect (Table 1). (B–H) Personality traits were as follows: extraversion (B), emotional stability (C), agreeableness (D), conscientiousness (E), openness to experience (F), imagination (G), and intellect (H).