Birth Order and Personality Traits: Birth Order's Influence on Emotional Intelligence, Leadership Aspirations, and Grit

Abstract

Birth order is a rigid characteristic of individuals that can affect certain personality traits. Past research has found that different birth orders correlate with conscientiousness, dominance, cognitive intelligence, sociability, extraversion, and openness to experience. For instance, research has suggested that firstborn children have higher cognitive intelligence than later-born children. Nonetheless, many factors influence success, and those factors, in turn, may be differently affected by birth order. This study investigates the effect of birth order on the grit, emotional intelligence, and leadership aspirations of 151 Princeton University undergraduate students. These relationships were examined through an emotional intelligence survey, a grit survey, and a leadership survey. No statistically significant effects appeared. However, middle-born children scored marginally higher on the grit survey than did firstborns or last-borns, and a small positive correlation appeared between emotional intelligence and leadership aspirations, independent of birth order. The results may be inconclusive because the participants come from a narrow subset of the population known to be highly driven. Future research should focus on both a wider demographic and an older group of adults who are in the workforce, the latter addition to examine whether birth order affects the types of careers people pursue. Keywords: personality traits, birth order, grit, emotional intelligence, leadership, intelligence, parental attention