How Does Birth Order Impact Career Success?

We tested the effect of the birth order on selection of various careers (scientific, artistic and creative status, performance, education, professional prestige and income) using a large sample of 3,673 longitudinal models with relevant controls. We also tested the synthesis of birth order effects on the career outcomes, personality traits, intelligence and educational success. We found negligible effects of birth order between 0.02 and 0.12 on all correlative metrics, with first-and second-born children choosing more creative careers and achieving higher prestige and education.

Based on these two models, first-borns were more likely to pursue scientific careers, achieve higher levels of education, pursue more prestigious careers and earn higher incomes, while later-born people were more likely to pursue artistic and creative careers. In conditional placement models, the test results revealed that intelligence and educational success, but not personality traits, constituted a substantial part of the variance associated with birth order and career outcomes.

The niche model requires siblings to develop competing strategies to maximize parental investment and fill different family niches. According to this model, first-born children are assigned traditional roles in the family as responsible, goal-oriented and self-confident children. However, there are factors that have a greater impact on the professional success of older siblings.

It is believed that the birth order has a major influence on a child’s psychological development. However, if one believes that behavior and personality have no influence on the birth order, Alfred Adler notes that new research shows that there is a zero percent influence of the birth order on the personality of a child.

To test the role of biology and personality differences in the birth order, we took advantage of the fact that the biological birth order of children after the death of an older sibling or when their parents give the child up for adoption is very different from their social birth order. Biologics follows this pattern, because native children tend to have better birth outcomes, measured by factors such as birth weight, which is a standard for maternity health. There are many possible explanations for this, ranging from biological differences in the birth order to differences in sibling behaviour and how parents interact with younger siblings.

So, how does birth order impact career success? Studies show that younger children tend to have personality traits that lead to different career decisions than their older siblings. Middle-aged children embody a mix of characteristics of older and younger siblings and are more focused on relationships. Moreover, later-born children tend to be leaders, CEOs and founders more likely to achieve traditional success.

Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychotherapist of the 19th and early 20th centuries and founder of individual psychology, suspected that the order of birth leads to differences between siblings. Despite sharing genes and environment, siblings are not as similar in nature as previously thought. The psychological development of older siblings is more similar to that of the others as parents spend more time raising their first child and their unconditional love makes those born later more successful.

A new study finds little evidence that firstborns and younger siblings are predestined for certain careers. Alfred Adler, an Austrian psychotherapist of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the founder of individual psychology, considered the first-born to be neurotic because they did not share the years of their parents and were later dethroned by siblings.

Psychologists have been asking for decades whether the birth order influences career choices, but the latest research turns conventional assumptions upside down. Rodica Damian, assistant professor of A-psychology and director of the Personality Development and Success Lab, found that the role of the birth order in career type, occupational creativity and status was underestimated in previous research.

Previous studies have drawn general conclusions about what kind of work first-borns do better than siblings. A survey conducted by Disney in collaboration with researchers of more than 500 people found that first-borns are more likely to become scientists and engineers than younger children and that they are 50% less likely to work in classical music. She also suggested that middle children are 30 per cent more likely to become CEOs than their siblings.

Since first-borns are less inclined to fall short of their parents’hopes, they have more freedom to follow their dreams when it comes to career choices. We tend to associate firstborn siblings with leadership and success, baby families with rule-breaking and humor. First-borns are used to fighting for attention and respect and are not afraid of breaking the rules and redefined success.

Siblings hate being compared, and mostly mothers and fathers can’t help but impose certain attributes on their children. You may never be asked in a job interview if you are an all-age child, but if you have siblings – and many of you do – it matters where you fall in the hierarchy, in the work you love, in the career you pursue, and how successful you will be. The stereotype often focuses on those who aspire to be born charismatic, feral, or lost in a thicket in the middle, but being born prematurely is a real thing that psychologists have learned to discover, he wrote in his 2011 book The Sibling Effect.

Researchers say the birth order has minimal impact on a person’s career, creativity and overall life outcomes. Typical stereotypes are that firstborns are more analytical than their younger brothers and sisters and strive for better-paying jobs, higher-education careers and prestige science subjects in general. Later children, on the other hand, tend to be more creative, artistic and relaxed when it comes to career issues.

Greenberg agrees that the family in which we grow up, the prenatal environment, the early relationships with our caregivers, and our family life and siblings shape who we are and who we are. Education expert Michael Grose believes that the firstborn enjoys special privileges that others do not, regardless of their birth order. There are other things to consider, such as the personality of the child, age differences between siblings and the family circumstances that children experience during their formative years.

The new study says the birth order is related to IQ because older siblings have a higher IQ than younger siblings. “The amazing thing is that the first-born child of an older sibling who is dead in childhood has the same IQ as the first-born child. The same is true for the second- and third-born men who live with their eldest siblings.