Social climbing isn't about who you know after all, study finds

When it comes to social climbing, it's not who you know, or how many people you know, it's about knowing who knows whom, research suggests.
Experts studying social connections made by first year university students say those who ended up with the most influence were not necessarily the most popular, but those who had a good idea, early on, about who belonged to which clique or community.
'Having friends helps, but social influence isn't just about who you know – it's also about what you know about the rest of your social network,' said Isabella Aslarus, first author of the study from Stanford University.
Writing in the journal Science Advances, researchers in the US report how they asked 187 students to complete surveys about who they were friends with at six different points during their first year at university. The team used the results to map the connections between individuals, and how these changed with time.
At two points, once shortly after the start of the academic year and once in the spring term, the researchers ranked students by how many friends they had and their social influence – with the latter determined by how well connected their friends were. The researchers also asked each participant if they knew whether given pairs of students were friends.
The results reveal the number of friendships people reported changed little over time, however the friendships between individuals, and people's level of influence, shifted.
'Popularity does not really change over the course of the year,' said Dr Oriel FeldmanHall, co-author of the study from Brown University. 'What changes dramatically is the people who were the most influential early on were no longer the most influential by the end of the year.'
This shifting network, the researchers add, became more stable as the academic year went on.
FeldmanHall said it is not clear what made people influential early in the study, however the students who rose to become the most influential by the end were those who had early insights about how all their peers were connected.
'To become influential, you need to know who is friends with whom, and you need to have a bird's eye view of how people cluster into different social groups or cliques,' said Aslarus, adding individuals can use that knowledge to become more influential – for example by making new friendships or being an effective matchmaker.
Aslarus added that it is only after becoming influential that people develop more detailed knowledge about individual friendships.
'Knowing about your network predicts becoming influential over time, more so than just having lots of friends,' she said. 'So, social knowledge seems to be a key first step toward becoming better-connected in your network.'

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Damian echoes this: "While we don't find differences in personality that are systematic, that doesn't mean that there aren't social processes within each family or within each culture that can lead to different outcomes based on birth order." For example, the UK has a historically (male-preferring) primogeniture culture, meaning the eldest child would be the first in line to inherit family wealth, estate or titles. Only in 2013, with the passing of the Succession to the Crown Act did primogeniture within the monarchy end, removing the power of a male heir to displace an elder daughter in their right to the Crown. The idea of primogeniture is surprisingly widespread and persistent: in Succession, the HBO satirical comedy-drama, about a family's fight to take over a media empire, one character shouts "I'm the eldest boy!" in the finale. He believes his birth position should give him the right to take over his father's position of CEO. (He is actually the second-eldest son, but we won't get into that). "If the social practice is based on birth order, then yes, birth order will impact your outcomes," says Damian. Age is just a number? Age-related experiences can easily be mistaken for a personality trait or behaviour influenced by birth order, the researchers explain. Take the older, "responsible" sibling as an example: "As people grow older, they become more responsible, more self-controlled. So, the firstborn is always going to be older than the later born, and as you observe your children grow, the firstborn will always be more responsible," says Damian. "Another thing is that people become more self-conscious as they grow older," she adds. "So the second-born might appear more sociable and less neurotic, because a 10-year-old is much more happy and full of themselves… compared to the 14-year-old, who's freaking out about everything. That's because they have different challenges." Factors such as children's friendship circles also matter. Multiple studies suggest a link between delinquent peers and delinquent behaviour, for example, so an older child could be more of a rule-breaker depending on the people with whom they surround themselves. Smart siblings As aforementioned, one consistent finding that crops up in birth order research is the link between birth order and intelligence, with firstborns averaging slightly higher in intellect-related traits than younger-borns. "[The intelligence link] mostly shows up in verbal intelligence test results, and it has a very small effect," says Damian. Also, "if you took a test twice, you'll probably score depending on the day or mood, [or] whatever you ate that morning, [or] how long you slept." It may also be explained by cognitive stimulation in the early years of life. Damian points out that the more adults per child you have in a family, the more exposed they are to mature language and vocabulary. But when there are more siblings born into a family, levels of intellectual stimulation might decrease. "So it's not so much that they're genetically smarter or that they have more potential – it's more that they translate into a higher verbal IQ score on the test which could be due to knowing more words, because more adults versus children spoke to them," she says. "With two children, maybe some of that reading time is taken by managing sibling interactions where the verbal input is a little bit less elevated." There are also suggestions that as older siblings tutor younger siblings, or explain things to them, they use "more cognitive resources". Interestingly, these patterns of intelligence aren't replicated globally. Data from developing countries differs to data from developed countries, for example. In Indonesia, later-born siblings are likely to have better educational opportunities than their older siblings, potentially due to financial constraints, easing only when older siblings begin contributing to family income. According to Damian and her colleague, birth order has "negligible effects" on careers, too. In the past, there an idea prevalent among scientists was that the older sibling would enter a more academic or scientific career, and the younger a more creative one. But Damian found the opposite: in her longitudinal study, which looked at a sample of US high students in 1960 and then the same participants 60 years later, first-borns ended up in more creative careers. 'Selfish' only children? Only children often face the stereotype of being more selfish than children born with siblings, supposedly because they do not have to compete for a parents' attention. Recent studies, however, have shown that this is not the case, and that growing up without siblings does not lead to increased selfishness or narcissism. Other research suggests that the social behaviours of only children compared to children with siblings are not large or pervasive, and "may grow smaller with age". Birth order research has typically not included only children on the grounds that they cannot be fairly compared to children who have grown up with siblings. However, it is possible to compare the personality traits of siblings and only children, according to a 2025 paper by Michael Ashton, a professor of psychology at Brock University, Canada, and Kibeom Lee, a professor of psychology at the University of Calgary, Canada. Their study presented some new and fascinating results. It examined the association between personality, birth order, and number of siblings, in 700,000 adults online in one sample and more than 70,000 in another, separate sample. Middle-born and last-born siblings averaged higher on the "Honesty-Humility" and "Agreeableness" scales than first-born siblings. "Honesty-Humility" measures how honest and humble a person is, meaning, a high-scoring person is unlikely to manipulate others, break rules, or feel entitled. A low-scoring person may be more inclined to break rules and may feel a strong sense of self-importance. On the agreeableness scale, a high-scoring person tends to be forgiving, lenient in judging others, even-tempered and willing to compromise, while a low-scoring person may hold grudges, be stubborn, be quick to feel anger, and be critical of others. "These differences were quite small in size, particularly when the comparisons involve people from families having the same number of children," Ashton and Lee say in an email. "In contrast, the differences in these dimensions between persons from a one-child family (i.e., only children) and persons from a six-or-more-child family were considerably larger, somewhere between the sizes that social scientists would call 'small' and 'medium'." So, I ask, is the influence of birth order just a zombie theory – a concept that is wrong but which refuses to die? Rohrer disagrees. "I'm not sure whether I would call it a zombie theory," she says. "From the scientific perspective, I think the literature is progressing quite productively." So we may, one day, have a clearer answer as to what it means to be an eldest daughter. Until then, I'll keep letting my younger sister believe I'm inherently smarter than her. -- For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.