(credit: Flickr / Gemsling)
For centuries, humans have been curious about the effect that birth order has on personality, possibly because eldest children in ruling families typically inherited the seat of power. A new study published in PNAS finds that firstborn children tend to score higher on objective measures of intelligence and self-reported measures of intelligence. But it finds that there are no birth-order effects on other personality characteristics.
Though the findings regarding intelligence are consistent with existing data on birth order, the other results contradict both scientific and common ideas about how much birth order influences personality.
The study in question used data from three large national panels in the US, the UK, and Germany, with a total of over 20,000 participants. Due to the large size of this data set, the researchers were able to identify even very small effects of birth order on personality with high statistical power.
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