Interesting Monkey

sibling stereotypes

I’ve always been fascinated with sibling stereotypes. The idea is that there are some general patterns that occur in aggregate based on your position on the sibling totem pole. The eldest siblings tend to be the most responsible, and the youngest the most free-wheeling, etc..

Here is an article, summarizing a new paper in the journal Animal Behavior¹. They give a metric to measure the level of cooperation, and also reciprocation in humans. Then they test both based on sibling order.

The eldest siblings faired the worst here on both counts. However, this did not hold true for “only children”, indicating that it is something that can get “switched on” environmentally at an older age.