Birth Order And Personality

The ambition of conducting this experiment is to study the influence of birth order on personality. In order to carry this experiment out, the ‘Big Five Theory’ was used. Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was the first psychologist who first proposed the role of personality in birth order. Birth order is known as the ordinal placing of a child within the siblings of a family. It is mostly ranked according to his or her age. It focuses mostly on personality. Alfred Adler characterized the social influences of personality on birth order and suggested firstborns as “power-hungry conservatives”, middle children as competitive and the later-born children as spoiled and lazy. Up to this day many of the psychologists have been studying and conducting

Trait of higher scorers in this are known as extroverts and lower scorers are known as introverts.
Conscientiousness focuses on competence, self-discipline, achievement-striving, dutifulness, order and deliberation. Participant who score high in this trait are known as perfectionists and participants score low in this trait are more laid-back.
Agreeableness measures the trust, modesty, compliance, altruism, straightforwardness and tender-mindedness. Participant who scores high is meant to believe that they are honest, decent and trustworthy. And the low scoring participant are less concerned to others and reported as having less empathy.
Openness measures the feelings, fantasy, aesthetics, actions, ideas and values. And the participants with high scores may seem to be daydreaming a lot and participants who scores low are more down-to-earth.
Finally neuroticism which measures the anxiety, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness and vulnerability. Participants who scores higher in neuroticism are mostly known to be

Farley of the University of Wisconsin, Madison , this study was done to find the highest order personality dimension on extraversion-introversion and neuroticism and to study the functions of birth order between two sib families. To conduct this study they used 141 female participants which they controlled and separated the sex and age of the siblings. As the results of theirs shows that there was no significant in the dimension variation which was referable to birth order in females. The aim of my experiment is to study the effects of birth order on personality. First of all it is hypothesized that extraversion level will be higher in firstborns than later-born. Secondly it is hypothesized that consciousness will be higher in firstborns than later-born. The independent variable of my experiment are firstborn participants and later-born participants. Thus the dependent variable was set as the mean score of the measured personality trait for each participant.