• Question: do you think jealousy amongst siblings has a scientific explanation or is purely based on personal issues

    Asked by strongbow dark fruit to Sam, Rose, Maggi, Kirsty, Ben on 16 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 16 Jun 2017:

      Hey 🙂 Good question! At a really basic level it might be down to competition between siblings. In other species and in human history, babies would have to compete for their parents’ attention, care, protection and food! While obviously this is not the case with humans nowadays (hopefully!), there might still be some of this built in to our behaviour! In this way, siblings can feel jealous of each other if they feel that the other is getting more resources (which nowadays are more likely to be material things such as toys, presents etc.), love or attention from parents. However, this could be overcome if the siblings get on well, or get on well with their parents, so personal issues, or quality of relationship could make this either better or worse!

    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 17 Jun 2017:

      If you look at the animal kingdom you can see how siblings compete in the way Kirsty described. Sometimes it’s so bad it results in “siblicide” which is when one sibling kills another! Eek! A good example is the spotted hyena: in this mammal, intense aggression towards siblings occurs only a few minutes after birth! So not quite the cute kittens we see in youtube videos! It’s thought that this is to establish a ranking position among the other cubs. In the animal kingdom, lots of offspring don’t survive, so many animal parents focus their resources on the ones most likely to survive (as a way of ensuring the survival of their genes). So as a hyena cub you’d definitely want to be as far up the ranking system as possible!

Comments