Recent studies found that middle children are more honest, humble, and enjoyable than their adult siblings in a family. It also said that middle children are one step ahead of their siblings in things like agreeableness, cooperation, and humility.
Studies conducted
According to a study conducted by psychology professors at Brock University in Ontario and the University of Calgary in Alberta, Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee found that people with more siblings mostly have high levels of the cooperation trait. They also saw that there is a small effect on cooperative personality traits with the middle and the youngest children, who are superior to firstborns.
Understanding birth order and personality
Some researchers have tried a long way to comprehend a link between birth order and personality. Below are some instances:
> An Australian psychologist Alfred Adler claimed that firstborns are responsible, the youngest are coddled, and middle children often feel neglected leading to some traits in response to the behaviour they get.
> Some research previously traced some evidence that firstborns are little average than late borns in intellect trait.
New studies
The new study understands whether personality trait levels could be linked to birth order and sibling number. It used measures with the people rating their own levels of traits like honesty-humility (H), emotionality (E), extraversion (X), agreeableness (A), conscientiousness (C), and openness to experience (O).
Researchers also asked participants about the household in which they grew up and observed their birth order.
An analysis
Scientists from the University of Calgary in Canada examined a set of data in a study about 700,000 adults from different backgrounds, assessing each one across major personality dimensions. Researchers discovered that cooperative traits such as honesty-humility and agreeableness were high for middle-born participants, followed by last-born and first-born people.
> In people having the same number of siblings, the firstborn averaged slightly lower compared to middle born and last born according to studies.
> The latest findings, according to researchers, point to one of the benefits of growing up with many siblings.
(With inputs from agencies)