Study finds that being born into a large family is associated with a more cooperative nature in adulthood

People who grow up with more brothers or sisters may have a more cooperative personality, i.e. with traits such as honesty, humility and agreeableness, according to a study published in PNAS. Using data from 700,000 adults surveyed online, the research concludes that mean honesty-humility and agreeableness scores are slightly higher in people with more siblings. Among those with the same number of siblings, people born middle and last have a slightly higher mean score than firstborns.

23/12/2024 - 21:00 CET
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Ruben Arslan - hermanos EN

Ruben Arslan

Researcher at the University of Leipzig (Germany)

Science Media Centre Spain

The new paper confirms the current mainstream view that birth order can only account for very small differences in personality in Western countries. They have added a result on differences in honesty/humility, a trait that is less studied than the other traits in the study. 

They also studied the idea that differences in family size/sibship size cause differences in personality. They interpret their findings in support of this notion and it is here they discuss differences to prior studies. However, their analysis strategy fails to adjust for the many, many factors that are different between families other than the number of children. They adjust only for religiosity, but not for country of residence or birth, whether English was the mother tongue, socioeconomic status, the personality of the parents who choose to have large families, and so on and so forth. Their finding that children of larger families tend to be more honest and more agreeable could thus result from the family environment, as they infer. Or it could be better explained by a third variable, for example, it could just reflect higher cooperativeness of some geographic region at a particular time, if this region had higher fertility. This might explain differences with previous studies, which usually were conducted within a single country.

The author has declared they have no conflicts of interest
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Personality differences between birth order categories and across sibship sizes
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PNAS
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Michael C. Ashton et al.

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  • Peer reviewed
  • People
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