Birth Order and Your Personality

Most my friends and myself are the eldest in our families and share some similar traits ie. we’re the responsible ones, we went to university, we are nurturing, we take care of others, we are considerate, we’re non-confrontational but very protective.

So how about you? Which sibling order are you? Are you a typical eldest child? Neglected middle child? Bratty baby of the family?

Here are some articles I googled:

ABC News: Does Birth Order Determine Personality?

Birth order factor and your personality: 8 facts that might surprise you

Siblings birth order and personality types

Or have you proven these theories totally wrong?

I am also, but I don’t share the ‘non-confrontational’ part. I also think 1st children are more adventurous.

[quote=“914”]Most my friends and myself are the eldest in our families and share some similar traits ie. we’re the responsible ones, we went to university, we are nurturing, we take care of others, we are considerate, we’re non-confrontational but very protective.

So how about you? Which sibling order are you? Are you a typical eldest child? Neglected middle child? Bratty baby of the family?

Here are some articles I googled:

ABC News: Does Birth Order Determine Personality?

Birth order factor and your personality: 8 facts that might surprise you

Siblings birth order and personality types

Or have you proven these theories totally wrong?[/quote]

From the first link you posted:

[quote]Putting Birth Order in Context

[b]But Dalton Conley, author of “The Pecking Order,” another book on the effects of birth order, says, “birth order makes about as much sense as astrology, which is almost none.”

Conley explains in his book that a lot of other factors affect the behavior of first-borns and last-borns much more strongly.[/b] “Early death of a parent, timing of economic shocks to the family, gender expectations and roles in the family, you name it,” Conley said, “outside influences, random events — birth order is basically at the bottom of that list.”

[b]“It’s just like astrology,” he added. “When you see a good fit, you say, ‘Hah! He’s such a Gemini.’ When you see a good fit, you say, ‘hah, he’s such a first-born, aggressive control freak,’ but when it doesn’t fit the mold you don’t even notice it.”

Conley says Sulloway’s data is quite selective, relying on cases that support his claims and ignoring those that don’t. When I asked him about that, Sulloway said, “It is human nature that we look for evidence to confirm our theories.[/b] But I took rather unusual steps in born to rebel to minimize as much as possible that sort of bias.”

Sulloway does acknowledge that there may not be hard and fast rules about birth order. “Humans are complex,” he said, “The fact that you can find things that are more important than say, birth order, doesn’t mean that birth order isn’t something we don’t learn from.”[/quote]

Sorry but this hardly qualifies as anything approaching a theory worthy of respect and attention. And Sulloway’s rebuttal to Conley’s criticisms is not exactly a stunning defense. Conley - you selected data to fit your theory. Sulloway - I’m only human…but I didn’t do that much, honestly. No really.

Yeah, that’s a real scientific theory Sulloway’s working up there. Just about on par with the flat earth “theory”.

Oh but wait, I thought it was the younger sons who were more adventurous, more likely to go exploring, etc., whereas the first born sons are the responsible ones who stay on the farm.

What’s that you say? That is a long debunked historical myth that uneducated people still spout off whenever they feel like exposing their ignorance? Oh OK gotcha.

I think 914 was looking for factors in relation to position in your family in order to compare. Nowhere do any of the theories suggest that being born in a certain position in your family sets your personality, but more that it has a general influence.

Comparing to Astrology is unfair since there is no relationship impact between a man-made relationship between our Earth’s current relative position in our solar system and when we were born. Yet I think the position you are born in a family is much more likely to have an impact on your personality.

Do you really deny that only children are more likely to be selfish and insensitive?

One of the major issues with this theory is that personality is created by a certain age. If younger siblings are had after that age, birth order can only have a small effect on personality.

Good point, perhaps it makes a large difference too, how closely then the age gaps are between siblings.

Not proven, just a theory I heard once:

Each kid want to be unique, so they will adjust to and occupy various behavioral niches.

The oldest will occupy the niches that are easy to acces, lead to praise from the parents and so on.
The second oldest will find the free niches, and maybe try to take over some niches where the oldest don’t have a strong position.
And so on and on and on…
Of course, the gender of the siblings and the age difference will also matter and affect which niches are occupied or available at any time.

I have two sisters, 2 and 5 year younger than me, and the path we have chosen/stumbled on during life is very different.

When I look at my 2 sons with 2 years age difference, I see that the youngest try to challenge the oldest in certain sports (maybe because then they can play together), but has chosen different areas of excellence in school (artistic vs. theoretical minded).

I think the theory of occupying and creating niches makes sense.

Didn’t I read somewhere that the more elder brothers a boy has, the more likely he is to be homosexual?

Reference: Gay Males’ Sibling Link - Men’s homosexuality tied to having older brothers

I’m an eldest child. Four younger sisters. We all went to university, but I’m irresponsible and a bit of a brat, to tell the truth.

Not just a bit. Ask Jojo…

Juba, that’s an interesting piece of info. Only in the case of boys, generally, not girls? I’ll have to go read the article at work tomorrow then.

I don’t mean to imply birth order determines your personality, but that it helps shape it because of expectations placed on you. Of course I’ve also met a lot of first born assholes, too. And the single child syndrome? Tell me about it! My best friend is a single child. She wants only one child and hopes it’s a girl. I always ask her why she wants to put her daughter through what she has endured (and is still enduring) all her life. Oh well. :idunno:

My older (oldest child) brother was definitely an adventurous rebel and achiever, as described in the articles. Left home after high school, moving crosscountry to become a Colorado ski bum; later founded a highly successful company that he ran for 20 years and made a fortune.

But I, the middle child, was rebellious too, getting kicked out of home and hitchhiking cross the US as a teen, followed by years of further rebellion. Nor was I “neglected” as 914 describes the middle child. On the contrary, due to my golden hair, etc., I got special attention from family and others. But I agree with the one article’s description of the middle child as being a people person who doesn’t like conflict and likes to get along.

And my younger (youngest) bro was a rebel too, I guess, spending a year of high school in Finland, of all places, and doing lots of drugs and crazy stuff till he finally went off to live on an island.

I don’t know – I guess I agree with the above poster who said one always picks ideal cases to prove the point, as with horoscopes, and dismisses those that don’t fit, though it does seem there should be some very broad generalizations that sometimes apply re birth order, subject to many, many exceptions based on the widely divergent circumstances.

PS: I was surprised at this thread. Initially I thought it would be whether you feel like you really are a pig or monkey or ram or cow, etc.

[quote=“Tyc00n”]I think 914 was looking for factors in relation to position in your family in order to compare. Nowhere do any of the theories suggest that being born in a certain position in your family sets your personality, but more that it has a general influence.

Comparing to Astrology is unfair since there is no relationship impact between a man-made relationship between our Earth’s current relative position in our solar system and when we were born. Yet I think the position you are born in a family is much more likely to have an impact on your personality.

Do you really deny that only children are more likely to be selfish and insensitive?[/quote]

Yes, I “really” do deny it. Shocking isn’t it?

And I disagree the astrology analogy is inapplicable. Whether the condition is man-made is irrelevant; both theories present a set of conditions which are purported to have predictable effects on personality development. I agree with the critic in one of 914’s links who said we only notice these “effects” when they correspond to our expectations. We never notice it when someone doesn’t fit the mold.

I also think there is a bit of selective filtering involved too. There was a major astrology fad in my high school, especially during my last two years. One of my favorite games to play when I encountered some idiot asking for my sign was to tell her (it was usually girls who got into the whole astrology thing) that I like to keep it private. That of course prompted them to continue the conversation, and at the end I would give them the wrong sign. That inevitably resulted in “I knew it!” followed by a discourse of how I fit into whatever character profile they choose to perceive. Then I’d tell them I lied and the fireworks would begin. :smiling_imp:

It wasn’t long before our school’s astrology coven or whatever they call it found out and nobody asked me for my sign any more. :frowning:

Hmm…I don’t believe there is anything to these theories, at least not regarding my family.

It’s 2 of us, my older brother was up until 20 years of age a non-adventurous, highly intelligent bookworm who mostly stayed at home reading. He brough home straight As in all subjects except sports, where he totally sucked. While I was never home, but playing with friends, climbing trees, building hideouts etc. I was not bad in school either, but never as good as my brother. We both went to Uni.

But don’t you also live on an island?

Anyway, I’m the youngest in my family, went to university all the rest of it and certainly have different personality traits to my brother. He is a complete polymath, I have no doubt in my mind that he would have been successful whatever he chose to do. He is also pretty adventurous. Whereas, I’m good in only certain areas. I would also say that I’m more prone to depression than he is, although that could be a whole range of factors.

Study Says Eldest Children Have Higher I.Q.s (New York Times).

[quote]The eldest children in families tend to develop slightly higher I.Q.s than their younger siblings, researchers are reporting, based on a large study that could effectively settle more than a half-century of scientific debate about the relationship between I.Q. and birth order.

The difference in I.Q. between siblings was a result of family dynamics, not biological factors like changes in gestation caused by repeated pregnancies, the study found.

Researchers have long had evidence that first-borns tend to be more dutiful and cautious than their siblings, early in life and later, but previous studies focusing on I.Q. differences were not conclusive…

Joseph Lee Rodgers, a psychologist at the University of Oklahoma and a longtime skeptic of the birth-order effect, disagreed, arguing that the new analysis was not conclusive.[/quote]

Here’s the study, which was published in Science: Explaining the Relation Between Birth Order and Intelligence, by Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal.

Yes, but I think people from Scotland should be excluded from the theory. Men who wear dresses hardly fit into a ‘normal’ sample group. :smiley: :wink:

I read those news stories about the relations between birth order and personality or birth order and IQ. Those researches can’t determine the cause-and-effect relation between the two pairs of variables by their research methods. They merely point out correlations. I think many confounding variables factor in the correlations. And some of them could be the real factors that influence subjects’ personality or IQ.

To statistically analyze data sometimes turn out to be the result of what we call “garbage in; garbage out.” So researchers should carefully build up their hypothesis and theory framework before they go on their study.

I am curious about why those researchers are so obsessed with birth order.
It seems a kind of determinism because people can’t determine their birth order.
Does it mean that people are helpless because birth order controls their fate if birth order really decides their personality or IQ?

I personally prefer to study what factors make people actively to become better ones than how people passively are determined by some factors.

Even by the simple fact that more time is spent with the first child during those critical first few years (well at least 9 months), but then divided later, should have some impact on development.