No Evidence That Siblings' Gender Affects Personality across Nine Countries

Thomas Dudek, Anne Brenøe, Jan Feld and Julia Rohrer ()
Additional contact information
Thomas Dudek: Victoria University of Wellington
Julia Rohrer: University of Leipzig

No 15137, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Does growing up with a sister rather than a brother affect personality? In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the effects of siblings' gender on adults' personality, using data from 85,887 people from 12 large representative surveys covering 9 countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Mexico, China, and Indonesia). We investigated the personality traits risk tolerance, trust, patience, locus of control, and the Big Five. We found no meaningful causal effects of the gender of the next younger sibling, and no associations with the gender of the next older sibling. Based on high statistical power and consistent results in the overall sample and relevant subsamples, our results suggest that siblings' gender does not systematically affect personality.

Keywords: sibling gender; economic preferences; personality; sibling sex (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 J16 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 91 pages
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-lma and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Psychological Science, 2022, 33 (9), 1574 - 1587

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15137.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: No Evidence that Siblings’ Gender Affects Personality Across Nine Countries (2022)
Working Paper: No evidence that siblings’ gender affects personality across nine countries (2022)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp15137

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().