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Title: Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Rohrer, Julia M.
Egloff, Boris
Schmukle, Stefan C.
Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112,46 (17 November 2015): 14224–14229.
Also: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/46/14224.abstract
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: National Academy of Sciences (NAS), United States
Keyword(s): Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB); Birth Order; Cross-national Analysis; German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP); Intelligence; NCDS - National Child Development Study (British); Personality/Big Five Factor Model or Traits; Siblings

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person's position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person's life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to later-borns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality has not yet resulted in conclusive findings. We used data from three large national panels from the United States (n = 5,240), Great Britain (n = 4,489), and Germany (n = 10,457) to resolve this open research question. This database allowed us to identify even very small effects of birth order on personality with sufficiently high statistical power and to investigate whether effects emerge across different samples. We furthermore used two different analytical strategies by comparing siblings with different birth-order positions (i) within the same family (within-family design) and (ii) between different families (between-family design). In our analyses, we confirmed the expected birth-order effect on intelligence. We also observed a significant decline of a 10th of a SD in self-reported intellect with increasing birth-order position, and this effect persisted after controlling for objectively measured intelligence. Most important, however, we consistently found no birth-order effects on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, or imagination. On the basis of the high statistical power and the consistent results across samples and analytical designs, we must conclude that birth order does not have a lasting effect on broad personality traits outside of the intellectual domain.
Bibliography Citation
Rohrer, Julia M., Boris Egloff and Stefan C. Schmukle. "Examining the Effects of Birth Order on Personality." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 112,46 (17 November 2015): 14224–14229. A.