In a study done about the relationship between siblings, it describes how certain ages affect what kind of competitions the siblings will face and they way they interact. From mine own reading of it, I can really see how me and my 15 year old brother have interacted from the time we were born. In the early times of our live everything we could do was a fight between who was stronger, faster, bigger and taller. These were the main things we competed against eachother with. After that, into our beginning of teen years everything changed to who was smarter and had better grades. This is where my parents would get involved and tell us that we were both equal and that we could do the same things with equal skill. Where we are now, I'm 18 and he is 15, everything with us is more on the social side of things. Who can have the most friends, be popular, that sort of thing. It even comes down to who has the all the girls, or who has the better girl.

Sibling Rivalry: studying the relationships between siblings

This topic submitted by Anne Marie McNerney, Joy Marie Usner (usnerjm@muohio.edu) at 10:32 pm on 2/27/01. Additions were last made on Wednesday, February 28, 2001. Section: Myers.

We hypothesize that the relationships between siblings as reported by students here at Miami will reveal that siblings will be more competitive at specific ages in specific areas. We hypothesize that students will report the highest rate of competition in the category of physical at the earlier stages of life, such as age 1 to 10. We believe competition will be reported as being the highest in the category of academics from the ages of about 10 to 15. From the ages of 15 to 20, we believe siblings will report the highest level of competition in the category of social.
This research is interesting because we are both siblings ourselves!!!! Altruistic behavior affects us all, be it if we are stranded on the side of the road with a busted tire, or in a pinch to finish a paper with no ink cartridge. It will be really interesting to see if people are predisposed to kindness, and how different sexes respond to people in need. We also are interested in how our own family structure and our birth order will affect how we treat other people. We will learn more about how the rivalry we experience with our own siblings affects our life experiences, and how we respond to our own and other’s experience. Other scientists have looked at other species to gain some sort of understanding about sibling relationships. Hyenas and boobies have been observed at length to learn more about siblicide and extreme cases of sibling rivalry. There has been a lot of research done on birds. Birds will often kill a sibling so that they can have a greater share of the resources (food). In humans similar rivalry over resources has developed. Humans often fight ovcr the attention of parents, toys, space in shared rooms, etc. The theories on Darwin, Trivers and Hamilton have been applied to these situations. Altruism is evident in situations beyond the nuclear family. International relationships are often based on altruism. The length of time a country has been established could be compared to birth order. Countries compete for resources, choose allies, and fight over territories. If we look at the world as a global village due to the ease with which nations interact similar to the way in which siblings interact. For our experiment we have designed a survey to show the stages in which siblings are most competitive in various areas.