Only children are more selfish (but they’re also more creative), study finds

The stereotype of the ‘only child’ is a spoiled brat who finds it difficult to get along with others – and that’s partially true, a new study has found.

But there are also upsides to growing up without siblings.

Tests on children in China – where there are rather a lot of only children, due to the government’s one-child policy, which affected around a third of the population – show that only children are more creative.

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But the same research showed that only children tested poorly for ‘agreeableness’ – warmth and concern for others.

Researcher Junyi Yang and his colleagues also scanned the brains of only children – and found differences which seem to match their behaviour.

Only children performed well on a creativity test which involved tasks such as coming up with unusual uses for cardboard boxes, according to the British Psychological Society’s Research Digest.

This was mirrored in their brains by differences in areas such as the supramarginal gyrus.

Dr Christian Jarrett says, ‘The only children’s superior performance on the creativity tasks tied in with their having more grey matter, on average, in the supramarginal gyrus of their brains than the participants with siblings (even after factoring out group differences in family income and parents’ education).

‘This is a region in the parietal lobe that Yang and his team said has previously linked with mental flexibility and imagination; also in this study, across all participants, grey matter volume in this brain region correlated with creativity scores.’