Having more siblings may promote development of more cooperative personality, researchers say. Middle children are more likely to be honest, humble, and agreeable compared to other adult siblings in a family, according to a new study. The study found that middle children tend to score higher than their siblings on traits linked to cooperation, such as agreeableness and honesty-humility.
The study, conducted by Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee, psychology professors at Brock University in Ontario and the University of Calgary in Alberta, respectively, also discovered that people with more siblings generally exhibited higher levels of these cooperative traits.
They also found that birth order does have a small effect on cooperative personality traits, with middle and youngest children scoring slightly higher than firstborns. Ashton and Lee also noted that people from larger families, with more siblings, were more likely to develop a cooperative personality.
Researchers have long sought to understand if there was a link between birth order and personality. For instance, Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler claimed that firstborns are responsible, the youngest are continuously pampered, and middle children often feel overlooked, developing certain traits in response.
However, previous research has only found some evidence that firstborns average slightly higher than later-borns in intellect-related traits. Even these studies largely have not included comparisons between only children and individuals raised with siblings, researchers say.
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