Influence Of Birth Order On Personality

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Birth order is assumed to influence various facets of one’s personality development, character, intelligence and career choices (Stewart et al., 2001). The behavior of the younger or elder in the family .This lead Alfred Adler to study the effects of birth order on personality. Alfred Adler is the founder of Individual Psychology and is first person who considered the influence of birth order on development of personality of an individual. While he described the general features and patterns for distinct birth order positions in the family, he highlighted how a person has a self-perceived position in his family. The perceived position of an individual in a family may or may not be the person's chronological position. Adler postulated that birth order had a direct influence on personality characteristics. Personality …show more content…

From their study , they identified that there is no substantial influence of birth order on personality and also said that research on birth order was a "waste of time.".. But , Kandler (2012) described that stability of inter individual differences in personality characteristics such as rank-order continuity inclined to increase with age and reaches plateaus in middle adulthood and finally reduces in old age. He reported that genetic and environmental factors contributes to rank-order continuity and change in case of neuroticism and extraversion personality development (Kandler, 2012). He pointed that both the genetic and environmental factors play significant role in continuity and change in personality development, but genetic factors influence rank-order change only in younger stages of life, while environmental factors influences appear to be source of inter individual differences throughout lifelong process of personality development (Kandler,