A two part question: On a scale of 1-10, how prone to violence are you, and how many siblings do you have?

I’m a 5, exactly as described actually. I hate confrontation & avoid it at all costs, unless defending myself or my family. I do like a good boxing match though, so long as there’s not too much blood flying about the place.
I grew up with two brothers, me being in the middle age wise.

Probably a 3. I have one older sister.

5 or 6.

I grew up with a stepbrother and stepsister.

According to your criteria, I think 2–4. It depends where fictional violence falls into that (video games and movies). I like fictional violence (unless there’s slicing or torture involved – I cover my eyes, lol) but not real violence. In order for me to act physically defensive, the person I’m protecting has to be in real immediate physical danger.

I grew up with 2 siblings.

5, I grew up with 2 older brothers.

I’m around a 7–8.

I am a special case in this situation. I have 3 older sisters and one older brother. However, my siblings are all very much older than me and were moved out before I came into the world. I still have a niece who is one year younger than I am and a nephew who is 2 years younger. We grew up together as best friends/siblings more than uncle/niece.nephew.

I’m basically a 1½, I think. I’m the kind of person who will pick up a bug with a kleenex and take it outside rather than kill it. Except for flies. I hate flies. I “wouldn’t hurt a fly” except for flies, strangely enough. I will kill them, slaughter them without hesitation. I do, on occasion, get into screaming fights but only with one person, one of my two best friends, and only because that is his style and I am willing to match him scream for scream if that’s what it takes to hold my own with him. And I will throw stuff sometimes but only when no one else is around and that is usually more out of frustration than anger. And I have one sibling. A brother, older by 2½ years.

Zero. I can’t stand watching violence or seeing it’s results. Road kill can ruin my mood for a long time.
Zero. I’m an only child. I’m also the oldest of my cousins by quite a bit. I wasn’t fond of other children as a child.

I’m a 5, had 2 older brothers, one 7 years older and one almost 15 years older.

Are you going to tell us what prompted this question, because I am curious!

Yes, I agree with @rooeytoo tell us why you asked. I’m coming up with lots of ideas, but I would love to know.

Sibling rivalries, is my best guess.

@ucme you are so smart. :)

Yes, rivalry, essentially. I was talking with another jelly about people having different tendencies towards violence, and I blamed my own (I would rank myself as a 7–8 or so on my own scale) on years and years of hair pulling, sucker punching, pinching, slapping fights that I’ve shared with my sisters. I love my sisters more than anyone else in the world, but we can be pretty brutal. The person that I was talking with more or less felt the same way about their situation, and this little theory came to be. So I decided to poll Fluther.

It was hardly rocket science after all.
I never fought with my older brother, but my younger brother…...boy did we fight!
I mean, we’d make up soon after, but it got fairly extreme on a number of occasions.
For the record he’s two years younger than me, so it’s not like I was picking on the baby ;¬}

I think I’m about a 4.
My brother is my only sibling.
I’m about 3½ years older than him.

It’s my pleasure to help you with your Psychology homework. ;-)

@ucme that’s an important part of it, I think. I should have asked the age differences between siblings, too.

there seems to be a lot of discrepancies in regards to our theory…...

My sister and brother fought often ..and they’d be pretty high up on the scale. I didn’t fight near as much with either of them. I was/am the middle child. I figured your little test had to do with the sibling rivalry comparison/link to adult violence, lol. I’m thmart like @ucme. :P

@ANef_is_Enuf Yeah, my “big brother” is a year older than me. That’s right, mam & dad had three kids in four years…...no television see! ;¬}

@Schroedes13 I wasn’t really expecting it to be an exact science… but I do wonder if age differences have any relevance, now that @ucme brings it up.

@Plucky well, it made sense for me… so I wondered how many others had a similar experience. :)

lol….I expected it to be dead on! frig….:(

I am two years apart from each of my siblings – they are four years apart. If that helps. :)

Part 1: 5
Part 2: 0

I’m around 7 on the scale.
And grew up with two sisters (2 years older, 6 years younger)

Interesting experiment. I’ve wondered this on many occassions. But more with reference to self confidence and esteem rather than inclination to voilence.

@sarahhhhh what effect do you think that siblings have on confidence and self esteem?

6 on the scale [ wish I was calmer ].

I have a brother but after the age of .. we went our separate ways so I was alone.

[ violence in a family doesn’t start from being alone or with many siblings. If you are alone and the parents are always at work one doesn’t need to resort to violence toward others. The same for having siblings. I know spoiled kids who were alone and ended up not being violent and kids who were spoiled and became violent just so they could keep some of that “spoil” . I know families with a lot of siblings and none of them became violent and families who still have violent kids ].

To be honest I have only ever thought about possible theories as opposed to any research. But what I do observe from human behaviour in passing I have noticed that an only child is usually average on self esteem.

In the case of more than 1 child: The older one is generally quieter and less confident than the youngest child. The youngest I notice are very much extroverted while the older ones (even if confident) are more introverted and subtle in their ways.

@sarahhhhh that seems to apply to my family. Interesting observation, I like it.

Probably like an eight…
There are five of us…

I’m not keen on violence so I would say about a 2 but I do like watching a good boxing match so it may be a 5.

I have a younger brother and sister.

I would think gender of the jelly and the siblings makes a difference.

I am a 2.
I have one younger sister.

Going by your scale, I would be a 5 in part 1. I’m comfortable watching violence, but I rarely commit an act of violence myself.
In part 2, I grew up ( am still growing ) with 4 younger siblings.

6

The fourth child of five. There is seven years between me and the one above me though so we didn’t really ‘grow up’ together. My older brothers had left home while I was still a kid.

Eight or nine, depends on the situation…. I’m always on my guard having been attacked several times in adulthood…. As a kid I had a brutal older brother five years my senior, who’s main favourite pass time was kicking the sh*t out of me when ever the opportunity presented itself….. Two older sisters +7yrs & +3yrs which makes me the youngest of four…I’m not a lover of large crowds either come to think of it. :-/

1.

I grew up with an older male cousin whom I related to like a brother.

I’d give myself a 5 and I have one brother.

It’s imposible to quantify on a sliding scale, since I have actually engaged in violence toward other men during my life. It’s situational, depending upon the circumstances and the excegencies of the situation.

I have one step-brother and a half-sister.

5 and I have one brother

I’m a 5 and I’m an only child

I’m about a 6 on the violence scale.

In my adoptive family, I have 4 brothers and sisters.

I’d put myself at about a 2, and I have one sibling (older sister).

I am a 4–5 on the violence scale as described. (If it wasn’t defined I would say I am a 2–3.)

I have 3 siblings; an older brother 6 years older, a sister 5 years older, and a brother 8 yrs younger.

It really depends. Whenever I see someone get hurt, I actually feel pain, and it makes me really sad for them. But I also have times where I get really angry and just want to destroy shit. So I guess normal, everyday me would be about a 3.

I’m an only child.

I am afraid that @ucme is in fact @rebbel, or vice versa. :-)
A five i am too, i only get violent (i assume) when loved ones are (bound to be) hurt.
Or when attacked by wasps.
Two brothers, one older, one younger.

@rebbel I wondered if I had any Dutch in me…..keep it clean!
I’ve always been fond of windmills & cheese & clogs & patronising comments ;¬}

5 and 1, but she died.

2 or 3 on the scale. I am not prone to violence, I don’t like it too much in movies, but I will use it deliberately.

I have three siblings.

Actual, physical violence? Maybe a 5? Verbal violence- about a 12.

I had 1 older brother. Sometimes we got along, sometimes we didn’t. I do resent the fact that he gave me my first cigarette, though, the bastard. I don’t remember a lot of sibling rivalry, I just remember him pushing my buttons by saying really ridiculous, false things on purpose. Perhaps that’s the main reason I have such a hangup with correcting people.

I’m a 1 and I grew up with 5 other siblings. I’m the child in the middle:)

5 on the scale

6 siblings

Part one – just about exactly a 5.

Part two – I have two siblings, both younger than me. One is considerably younger, I was 14 when he was born.

What’s your theory about the relationship?

I’d put myself at 2–3.
I grew up with three older brothers

I am a 5 on the violence scale and I have 5 siblings.

I’d guess a 2. Takes a lot to light me up. And I’m really quiet, to the point I don’t say shit even with a mouthful of it. If someone does go the extra yard to experiment with me, they’re going to get Nagasaki 3.0.

Two sisters both younger than me. I shot the older one in the back with a pellet gun once…she was doing too much experimenting…that one time.

@woodcutter – what does experimenting mean???

@rooeytoo With me, experimenting is doing things to observe a cause and effect result when the experimenters should already know what is apt to happen if they continue to increase the intensity of such methods to get certain results that may not be favorable to their formula or efforts. This is when their experiment is declared a failure.

I guess a five. I can watch all sorts of violence, but I’m not a violent person. But because I can watch it, doesn’t mean I like it. I mean, violence in movies rocks, but real life stuff is not the same, and all I’ve ever really seen was a fistfight. (which also doesn’t last nearly as long as in a movie haha)

I’m not violent…against living things.
When I get really angry I can get pretty violent; but against objects, and I usually don’t let people see me. Usually…>_> I’m actually pretty good at breaking things. Sometimes I regret it cuz you know, it’s stuff I wanted to keep. XD Although busting shit up can be quite satisfactory when you’re pissed. This happened to me a lot when I was a teen, not so much now. Not because I can control my anger better, but because I don’t get nearly as angry as often. I guess there are different areas to consider in the violence spectrum.

When I’m drunk, I’m not violent at all. I just talk too much. Also I’m an only child.

I’m very unstable and will change from a day to day basis, somedays 0, others 5, and occasionally 10. Grew up with 2 siblings, but am guaranteed to ef someone up if they hurt one of my two little bros, especially the youngest one, paternal protective instincts definitely will launch me to an 11 with him.

@woodcutter – so you shoot em in the back with a bb gun. hehehe, hope I never fail with an experiment!

@rooeytoo I think you will be just fine. You have to really want to go into the dark side to make it to DEFCON 12 :) It was a pellet gun though. A BB gun would have would have buried the BB into the skin and that would have been really rank, even for me.

@woodcutter – whew, that’s a relief! :-)

I’m a 3 or 4 and I have 4 sisters and a brother.

Depends on the circumstances. I’d say a range of 4.8–7.1
Youngest of four. Though an age gap of 6–10.
Lots of siblings with a pseudo only-child experience.

Probably about a 2. I loathe boxing, can’t watch violent movies, etc. I have three sisters.

I am a 2. I will defend my family from threat or harm. I would never, ever be the aggressor in a situation. Ghandi is my hero and has been all my life. Oh, I have 1 younger sib and 3 older adopted sibs.