Effects of Birth Order on Intelligence, Educational Attainment, Personality, and Risk Aversion in an Indonesian Sample

Abstract

Few studies have examined birth order effects on personality in countries that are not Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD), even though theories have generally suggested interculturally universal family dynamics as the mechanism behind birth order effects, and prominent theories such as resource dilution would even predict stronger effects in poorer countries. Here, we investigate a subset of up to 11,188 participants of the Indonesian Family Life Survey, an ongoing representative panel study, to study whether later-born siblings differ from earlier-borns in intelligence, educational attainment, personality, and risk aversion. Analyses were performed using within-family designs in mixed-effects models. In model comparisons we tested for linear and non-linear birth order effects as well as for possible interactions of birth order and sibship size. Our estimated effect sizes are consistent with the emerging account of birth order as having relatively little impact on intelligence, education, personality, and risk aversion; and they exclude recent estimates from WEIRD populations based on large sample sizes. Thus, even the small effects of birth order reported in other studies appear to be culturally specific.

No effect of birth order on adult risk taking

“…Using specification curve analysis (16,17), an exhaustive econometric approach, they observed, in contrast to previous findings on the selection of sports and risky play, that birth order had no substantive effect on risk taking, or indeed on the various personality dimensions examined. Recently, these results were supported in an Indonesian sample (9).…”

“…A recent study using data from three large national panel studies, including the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), controlled for these methodological problems and found that birth order had no substantive effect on personality traits and only a negligible effect on intelligence (7). In parallel, the largest yet study of birth-order effects, which used a sample of 377,000 US high school students, found the same results (8), which were recently corroborated in a non-Western sample (9). For its authors, Damian and Roberts (10), Rohrer et al's (7) work has settled the debate: Birth order has no effect on personality.…”

Norms in Transition? The Relationship between Education and Singlehood

“…This obligation causes them to stay single and focus on their career. Another reason is that higher birth order is related to higher educational attainment (Botzet, Rohrer and Arslan 2018), which reduces the likelihood of being single.…”