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Birth Order Effect

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Effects of birth order on children and adults regarding mental instability, positional concern regarding success and willingness to cooperate with other people

Rosella Joseph
Alverno College

The effect of birth order or having siblings plays a huge role in the development of children and adult, because this topic is broad this will be focused on whether or not that birth order has a role in developing their abilities to cooperate with other people, mental stability, and “positional concerns in terms of income and success.” Significance of birth order was first introduced by Alfred Adler, he believed the order the person was born influenced his or her personality due to a “psychological situation created by the presence …show more content…
It was determined that family and background variables are important determinants of positional concern. The studies showed that siblings have the strongest “positional concern.” (Elima Lampi et al., 2010) Therefore, birth order has less of an effect than whether or not the person had siblings. One explanation that was that only children are more pressured to live up to their parents’ expectations than people with siblings and that since they were the only child they had no siblings to compete with. For those who grew up with siblings it was found that the number of siblings increases positional concern regardless of reference group. It was also found that the environment in which a child lives and how the parents treat him or affects the strength of his/her positional concerns as adult. Furthermore, it was discovered that a person cared more about “relative” position if that person thought he or she was compared with siblings during their …show more content…
Player A decides how much of this she wants to send to player B. This amount x is then tripled by the experimenter before being sent to player B. Therefore, at this stage, A has 30 and b has 30 plus 3x. Player B then has to decide how much she wants to send back to Player A called amount y. The results of the games showed that first borns were less trustful and reciprocated less than others, no differences in trust were found among later born. “Firstborn status” was a better predictor of cooperativeness than by sex, income, and religion. (Alexandre Courtiol,et al., 2009) These results established some of the first experimental proof that birth order differences established within the family can affect behavior among people who are not related to each

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