Middle Children Are More Cooperative And Honest According To This Study
There’s no shortage of stereotypes when it comes to birth order, especially in the age of social media.
Firstborns have been praised as overachieving leaders, while lastborns, or the “babies,” are sometimes called spoiled or self-centered. As for the middle children, they’re described as feeling forgotten, sometimes rebelling in response to that.
However, a new study published in PNAS has shone a fresh light on the personality traits of middle kids, suggesting those from larger families are more humble, agreeable, and honest. Still, more research will be needed since the latest finding contradicts past studies on birth order and personality.
It’s also important to note that, in spite of the stereotypes that run rampant online, most birth order research has produced highly inconsistent results.
While some studies identified strong connections between birth order and personality traits, others found no link whatsoever.
Two large-scale studies were conducted in 2015. The first analyzed data from 20,000 individuals across the United States, the U.K., and Germany.
It focused on the Big Five personality traits, including extraversion/introversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, neuroticism, and conscientiousness.
At the same time, the second study explored similar relationships. Researchers drew from the long-term Project Talent study, using a sample of 272,000 U.S. adults who went to high school in 1960.
Both of these endeavors provided little evidence that birth order significantly shapes personality. Now, the latest study published in PNAS indicates differences in personality are linked to birth order, and family size plays a key role.
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This research effort utilized the HEXACO personality model, developed by Michael Ashtona and Kibeom Lee, who authored the study. HEXACO shares similarities with the Big Five model, but its six traits are honesty/humility, extraversion, emotionality, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
Notably, HEXACO defines agreeableness as a tendency toward grace, forgiveness, and flexibility. This differs from the Big Five, which describes this trait as cooperation and warmth.
The analyzed data for this study was from hexaco.org. On the website, individuals could take a personality test to determine their HEXACO traits. The team examined birth order data for 710,797 participants and had data on both birth order and number of siblings for an additional 74,920 people.
Siblings were defined broadly as any other children in the household for this study. No distinguishments were made between step-siblings, half-siblings, or other biological relationships.
The findings revealed middle children actually scored the highest in agreeableness and honesty/humility. The youngest siblings came in second, followed by the oldest siblings, and only children scored the lowest. Additionally, individuals with more siblings tended to score higher in these traits.
Religion was a controlled factor that the researchers took into account, given the fact that religious families often have more children. They determined that religiosity explained approximately 25% of these differences. Nonetheless, birth order and family size were still contributing factors for the rest.
Despite the differences between siblings being small, the study’s authors argue they may stem from larger families requiring more cooperation.
“A commonsense possibility is that when one has more siblings, one must more frequently cooperate rather than act on selfish preferences,” concluded Ashtona and Lee.
“This ongoing situation might then promote the development of cooperative tendencies generally.”
To read the study’s complete findings, visit the link here.
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