Who of the elder, the youngest and the youngest is the most loyal and modest? Psychologists from Brock University in Ontario have found the answer by making one of the largest surveys to date.
The place of a child in a siblings always arouses many questions, because it is said that it influences its character and its role in the family. The elder, for example, is generally seen as the manager, the one on whom the main expectations rest. The cadet seeks to stand out, while the youngest is perceived as the little darling. But in fact, is this really the case? After numerous sometimes contradictory studies on the impact of birth rank, psychologists from Brock University, Ontario, in the United States, conducted a large investigation, published on December 23, 2024 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They tried to find out if a person’s personality is influenced by the birth order and the number of brothers and sisters in his family.
For this, psychologists Michael C. Ashton and Kibeom Lee used the Hexaco personality test with 700,000 volunteers. This test analyzes six facets of the personality: honesty and humility, emotivity, sociability, kindness, thoroughness and frankness. By crossing the data collected, the researchers discovered that indeed, the birth rank acts on certain personality traits. Their main conclusion is that children in the middle are more honest and more humble than their elders and their cadets.
“In a first sample of more than 700,000 adults, mainly from English-speaking countries, children in the middle have obtained the highest scores in honesty-humility and kindness, followed by youngest, elders and unique children”can be read in the investigation. In addition, experts have proven that the size of the siblings have a role to play.
The first results were “Confirmed in a second smaller sample (n> 70,000)”. In this one, “People from more families presented higher scores in these traits” of personality. And that’s not all, the researchers also suggest that growing up in a large family, with brothers and sisters, promotes the development of a more cooperative personality in the environment.
