My first reaction was to refute this, but I think I've convinced myself this may be correct, assuming attachment styles are the right frame.

I've been painted with the Avoidant brush, and logically it makes sense, broken home, removed from mother, moved regularly changing schools once a year for 5 years.

However, my siblings are the opposite. We come from the same house, they didn't change schools as often as I did, which made me wonder how we could be so different.

But when looked through the lens of friendships forming the attachment style, it makes more sense. I changed schools more often than my siblings, and therefore had more friendship changes, and less ability for attachment.

This really underscores the folly of the soft 'science' of psychology. We wrap our attempts to understand it in the veneer of the scientific method, but we're pretty much prodding at the dark because there are so many confounding variables that we could not possibly control for, hence the replication crisis. It's obviously not a bad thing to try to study psychology, but I think our society could collectively do with a lot less asserting psychological studies as anything resembling factual truth just because we trick ourselves into believing they're conducted anything like hard science experiments.

Also, beware of taking generalities (such as the claims of this study) and applying that directly that to your specific life, or anyone else's.

I mean, I like your comment and am glad you got thinking about this, but it's just a line of reasoning that I see a lot and I wish I saw less, so that's why I bring it up (:

"True for most people" does not imply "true for me" or "true for that person over there".

And the reverse is not valid either, of course - "true for me" does not imply "true for most people."

There's always some tension between people's individual anecdotes and experiences (which are fascinating, and I like), and the claims of broader studies like this one.

Sometimes I try to remind myself of this with the "on average, people have 2.3 children" factoid. Obviously, nobody actually has 2.3 children; the general truth does not necessarily apply to specific individuals; potentially not even a single one.

Similar story here. Six schools by seventh grade. I think it does mess with you a bit.

The family is a system, with different roles played by each participant. For instance, in toxic families, there is often one scapegoat, with an anxious attachment style, that affords the avoidant types in the family to participate in delusions.

What are the dynamics like of everyone in your family?