Relationship Between Birth Order And Personality

There are many things that effect a person’s personality and future success. Things like gender, race, ethnicity, and economic stability are all examples of what can affect a person’s development, but what about someone’s birth-date? Can a person’s birth-order really effect someone’s future? In “The Power of Birth Order” Jeffrey Kluger writes about how birth-order can determine a person’s personality and success; throughout “The Power of Birth Order” he established three categories: first-born, second-born, and third-born.

Almost all of us are familiar of the Birth Order theory that Alfred Adler presented almost a century ago. Adler theorized that our personalities are hugely influenced by our chronological place in the family because

According to Jeffery Kluger in his writings about birth order, firstborns, in most cases are smarter than the rest of their siblings that come along, resulting in an average of a 3 point IQ advantage over the next child that comes along. Firstborns tend to be overly responsible, reliable, and very well behaved because they get so much control and attention

If researchers hypothesis are supported and birth order affects first born children then, they will score high in Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, low in Openness to Experience, and Extraversion. Middle children score low in Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and high in Neuroticism. While youngest children will score high in Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Extraversion and low Conscientiousness. Current research will support the fact that birth order certainly plays a role as it pertains to personality and findings by Saroglou & Fiasse (2002) as well as Healy & Ellis (2006) supports the fact that parents expectations and treatment shape a child’s temperament.

Many people believe that sibling in the same family often have personalities, abilities, preferences that differ depending on their birth order. Moreover, some people feel that the birth order also affects the health, intelligence and personality characteristics of children. Many studies have been conducted to investigate this secret and scientists have discovered some interesting correlations, but also there are many controversial. Many external factors revolve around this theme such as the age of the people in the family, age distance, the total number of children, the sex of each child, environmental nurture and economic conditions social.

Birth order is nothing to take lightly. Weather being a first born child or a last born child is a prime factor in an adolescent’s maturing. Being a first born child might make you more cautious rather than a last born child may make you an attention seeking child. To few people’s knowledge, birth order determines many distinctive characteristics of an adolescent.

Moreover, the way they have been treated throughout their childhood can affect their personality dramatically. Birth order relates their difference in age, physical size, and status which can contribute to personality. Birth order is related to the roles and jobs available to offspring within the family. On average, first-borns tend to become leaders and hard-working. Later-borns are more agreeable, non-comforting, outgoing, and socially confident.There are many examples of how birth order can affect your personality. One example is, one day, my sister saw some item that she truly wanted on the internet. My mom kept saying no to her. My sister kept complaining and whining saying she really wanted it. Me being the person that doesn’t ask for anything, asks my mom to get something on the internet.

I believe that think that the birth order theory is false because I believe that life experiences are what affects the way our personality is what shapes a person’s persona. In class, we learned that birth order determined our personality in the case of my little brother, I find this to be completely false. For example, in the PowerPoint that was given in class we saw that if you were the older brother you were more of good role model to he or she’s younger siblings and more scholarly and the youngest brother was shown to be the brat of the family being spoiled, blames other etc. From how I perceived my brothers and I’s identity I would say that this is false because in my family we were both treated equally and raised in a similar fashion

The purpose of this journal was to show that birth order has a direct relationship with psychological outcomes. Dunkle, Harbke, and Papini show how they performed an analysis and discuss their findings regarding birth order. Their focus of this research was to explain if the outcomes support the Null Hypothesis or if their findings contradict the hypothesis. In their research they find

In the study done my McGuirk and Pettijohn, they looked at how birth order not only affects personalities but as well as relationship attitudes and styles.

Birth order studies are an attempt by contemporary psychology to explain how our personalities are fundamentally shaped by “family position”, and how this consequently “affects an individuals’ experiences and development” (A. Phillips and C. Phillips 474). Since psychologist Alfred Adler first published his birth order theory, countless studies have been conducted to corroborate his claims. Frequently, research has focused on specific traits of first-born and later-borns, as well as specific case studies into self-attributions and leadership potential.

As other studies have shown (Roberts & Damian, 2015), birth order had little change in GPA, but still do affect it . They tested 377,000 high school students to come to their final conclusion which is, firstborns usually have a 1-2 point higher IQ than later borns. The studies also show that children with less siblings, usually are from wealthy families who have the money to pay for a better education and tutors which can increase their IQ drastically. The conclusions Roberts and Damian made were, birth order made such a small difference in IQ and GPA that later borns it's had no practical relevance to people's everyday lives. The difference in first and later borns is “statistically significant but meaningless” said Damian (2015).

The birth order effect has proved to be a highly debated topic among psychologists and scientists for many years. Magazine pages are flooded with articles about how your birth order can help you pick a spouse or a career. Hundreds of books have been written about the way that birth order affects your personality and intelligence levels. There are many articles written on parenting websites suggesting the best parenting styles to use depending on the birth order of a child. Is the birth order effect a significant factor in who we are or just an elaborate, long-standing hoax? Birth order is the numerical order you are born in relative to your siblings (Moore and Cox, 1990). When a couple has a child, that child will be considered an only child until another child is born. When this second child is born that couple now has a firstborn and a baby of the family. If that couple goes on to have yet another child the first child remains the firstborn, the second child moves to the position of middle child, and the new child is now the baby of the family. The birth order effect emphasizes

There has been a lot of conflict about whether or not birth order has any impact on intelligence. Those who say that there is a connection between birth order and intelligence say that intelligence is lower in large families and that the youngest children in these family had the lowest IQ. A the raven test which was administered by researchers Belmont and Marolla showed that scores decreased as family size increased and that younger children had a lower score than there older siblings. Those who disagree say that intelligence is hereditary and parents with low IQ are the ones that have large families. This theory, Like all the others I have presented are open to exceptions, both of my parents are from large families, my mother having 4 older siblings and my father having 6 older and 1 younger siblings, Not only are they both intelligent people but they also only had two children my sister and me.

Investigation about the birth order effects first started in the late nineteenth century. Several researchers have claimed that the relation between birth order and intelligence