Image: Kevin Van Aelst
In Brief
- IQ scores have been steadily rising for a century, a phenomenon now known as the Flynn effect.
- The surge in scores comes from supposedly “culture-free” tests of intelligence such as pattern matching.
- Researchers believe the effect has its root in the increasingly abstracted nature of modern life.
- More advanced minds create technologies that, in turn, enhance intelligence still further, forging a feedback loop that shows no signs of abating.
Twenty-eight years ago James R. Flynn, a researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand, discovered a phenomenon that social scientists still struggle to explain: IQ scores have been increasing steadily since the beginning of the 20th century. Flynn went on to examine intelligence-test data from more than two dozen countries and found that scores were rising by 0.3 point a year—three full points per decade. Nearly 30 years of follow-up studies have confirmed the statistical reality of the global uptick, now known as the Flynn effect. And scores are still climbing.
“To my amazement, in the 21st century the increases are continuing,” says Flynn, whose most recent book on the subject— Are We Getting Smarter?— is being published this month. “The latest data show the gains in America humming right along at the old rate of three tenths of a point a year.”
This article was originally published with the title Can We Keep Getting Smarter?.
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20 Comments
Add CommentAverage IQ means what? Mean or median? I suspect the mean IQ is rising while the median stays the same or drops e.g. the curve is flattening.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy? At least on the Left Coast the old social prohibitions are gone and I suspect the young people are mating (self-segregating) on the basis of IQ, education, and ambition - winners with winners and losers with losers.
Unfortunately the phrase used repeatedly is that “IQ scores are increasing”. It should be stated somewhere that IQ scales are defined as having a mean of 100. The normal curve and the standard deviation of 15 are also by definition, rather than discovery. IQ cannot therefore increase. If a well-stratified sample is found to have a higher mean than 100, it means the norms have become out-of-date. This happened when a Japanese sample was found to have a mean of 109, causing much consternation in the USA. To counter the Flynn effect, restandardisation with new subjects has been obtained several times. The WISC was standardised on 2,200 US children in 1949 and then on 780 UK children, but several completely new standardisations have since been conducted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe issue of subjects becoming test-savvy also needs mention. At one time the UK used an “11-plus” exam to select pupils for either grammar school or secondary modern education. This had a huge backwash effect on education of 10 year olds, who spent much of the previous year practising tasks very much like the Similarities and Matrix Reasoning of the WISC. Unfortunately you have published an example (apple and orange) very close to the Similarities item, which the test agencies and APA strongly discourage. If that item were now reproduced in school textbooks, it would increase the Similarities scores of a generation of pupils.
The question of change in mental ability over historical time remains largely unanswerable. While intelligence testing has little current political influence in the UK, the question of “grade inflation” remains lively and contentious. The proportion of higher grade results in GCE A-levels has been relentlessly increasing for 20 years (though not this year). Professor Coe of Durham considers this to be an artefact and not a true increase in median ability. Coe found that students of similar ability were achieving on average about 2 grades higher in 2006 than they were in 1988, and 3.5 in mathematics. The move from exams to continuous assessment has the effect of increasing scores. Some tasks remain difficult even with intensive practice, so lend themselves to comparisons between pupil cohorts at different times. This is most true in mathematics, such as a novel application of the extension of Pythagoras. It is harder in languages, but précis of 1,000 words into 300 used to be a standard GCE exam in English language. Is study of changes in mental ability over time something Scientific American would encourage with the relevant research bodies?
To understand how problem solving is done in computing systems, you have to understand that all computing systems have hardware and software components. The hardware serves as informational chassis delivering and storing information. The software (information in memory) solves any significant informational problems that system runs into. For people, we call the hardware system a brain, and the software system a mind. These are two completely decoupled and separate systems – like oil and water.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is why newborns have zero problem-solving capability (like a mindless booting computer), and why animals spend so much time learning their worlds. Why people educate themselves to have better minds, and entire cultures can have a varying average IQ. If you educate any population in any way you are adding to their problem solving software, and so you are expanding their minds. This isn’t some sort of metaphorical expansion – it’s actually happening. The software system of the mind is just as real as the hardware system of the brain.
I hope this helps.
I debate the use of the term smarter. A brief review of the history of science should leave us moderns rather humble when examine the great intellects of the past. We will definitely continue to increase our knowledge base and by association we will appear to do better on standard measures like IQ tests. However application of knowledge is where we may find ourselves lacking. All the intellect in the world is useless if it can't be brought to practical application.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe history of science paces the history of measurement, machine tool and material development. If Isaac Newton had access to our technology . . . .
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the 1950's it was predicted that computers would "make us smarter." In the 1950's a store clerk could write out a bill of sale and total a grocery price list in his head. These days most blue collar/white collar are servants to the machines and the computers do the thinking.
Since the old social barriers are gone in the US I predict we will mate and self-segregate on the basis of IQ, education, and ambition. The (false) middle class will be gone and we will be a world of 80% grunts and 20% managers, professionals, and owners.
I have trouble believing this is not a hoax. Why? Because the claim is a rise of IQ which is the same, across the board for everybody, year in and year out. Has evolution ever had that effect?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother problem for me is that there doesn't seem to me to be any evidence of any current Americans doing work in my field, poetry, as much better than Wallace Stevens's, say, or TS Eliot's, as the superior IQ they should have suggests they should be. That seems to be the case in fields I know less about, too.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not an expert in anything "scientific" but I think Social Darwinism is confused with evolution. Social Darwinism talks about complexity. Evolution is about DNA changes from generation to generation and some changes help the next generation pass that DNA line on to the third generation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCritters with "cockroach" characteristics have been around for hundreds of millions of years. Doesn't that illustrate some sort of evolution peak where basic changes are not necessary to keep the critter line going? The goal of evolution? Pre-adaptation to future environmental changes?
In the last hundred years technology has permitted humans with defective DNA who should have died in infancy to pass in their DNA to the next generation. This is evolution at work?
It is one thing for chimps to learn to use sticks as tools. There will be sticks long after the chimp line of DNA has disappeared. Humans needing machines to exist is regressing, not evolving. When the next asteroid strike takes out 90% of all living things it is a good bet that something that looks like a cockroach will make it.
@billwald - Never gonna happen because as history shows, the grunts get disgruntled and kill off the owners.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Will We Continue to Get Smarter? The Flynn Effect Says Yes". This title may be a little IQ test. (No, as considered by #6 above, it is not a hoax.) The IQ test has been subject to major PC revisions for years with the direct objective to boost scores for populations deemed discriminated against. If you assume these efforts have done what they intended to do, wouldn't you expect some effect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn terms of real increases in real intelligence, on a global level, that is primarily a function of reduced starvation and the associated increased IQ as a result of better developmental nutrition. (Of course, in areas like the socialist utopian paradise of North Korea, in near starvation, IQ has gone down, alone with average height of their population.)
But, these "real" average IQ increases are NOT real in an absolute sense. That is, human DNA has not been undergoing a selection for more intelligence - in fact in the modern world for at least the last 100 years or so, a smart person, on average, has fewer kids (unlike old times when a large family made more sense). In fact, for some parts of the modern world we have a "self induced genocide" of sorts - reproductive rates below replacement. (Of course, in the US etc., third world immigration is filling the gap and then some.)
Another fact, easily verified, is that truly intelligent people have always tended to take their genes out of pool (how smart is that).
Richard Carlson
Tim Folger writes “‘How are an apple and an orange alike?’ A low scoring answer [to a ‘similarities’ question on an IQ test] would be ‘They’re both edible.’ A higher-scoring response would be ‘They’re both fruit’.”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo wonder IQ test are viewed with such caution (indeed I have never known IQ tests to be used in schools, universities or businesses here in Oz) when the scoring of these answers is so obviously wrong.
Placing both oranges and apples in the ‘fruit’ group tells me nothing useful to my survival. The only value is botanical.
But placing both oranges and apples in the ‘edible’ group is incredibly useful if I am hungry.
Edibility may be a “simple physical quality”, but during the long period of evolutionary pressure under which we evolved our brains recognising this quality was immensely important.
Maybe it is just as well that survival is not determined by IQ tests.
Tim Folger writes “‘How are an apple and an orange alike?’ A low scoring answer [to a ‘similarities’ question on an IQ test] would be ‘They’re both edible.’ A higher-scoring response would be ‘They’re both fruit’.”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo wonder IQ test are viewed with such caution (indeed I have never known IQ tests to be used in schools, universities or businesses here in Oz) when the scoring of these answers is so obviously wrong.
Placing both oranges and apples in the ‘fruit’ group tells me nothing useful to my survival. The only value is botanical.
But placing both oranges and apples in the ‘edible’ group is incredibly useful if I am hungry.
Edibility may be a “simple physical quality”, but during the long period of evolutionary pressure under which we evolved our brains recognising this quality was immensely important.
Maybe it is just as well that survival is not determined by IQ tests.
Anthony Wheeler
So humanity is constantly getting better at taking IQ tests.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople are getting smarter because science is cumulative. In the 17th century, only a genius like Newton can do calculus. Now, high school students are doing calculus. My 13-yr old son will be smarter than me. He's studying college-level algebra, biology, chemistry and geology without difficulty. I read his textbooks to learn.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is how Social Darwinism works but not how evolution works. When the next mass extinction occurs which group is more likely to survive, blue or white collar workers? College professors?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe'll be back to 3,000 BC but it will not take 5,000 yrs to get back to 21th century civilization since we already know science and technology. The ancient Egyptians who knew a little science and technology are more likely to survive than present-day illiterates.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Viva...: and what is your prediction?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@byron... : probably so.
Note that vocabulary and artimetic IQs are not increasing anway near as much as simularities. In fact, arthmetic is dipping possibly giving credence to Dr. Strangelove's observation that computatinal skills arebeing outsources to calculators.
"Will We Continue to Get Smarter?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course. I am incredibly smart and looking forward to being even smarter next year. I might eventually become smart enough to (1) have a better job (2) have more friends (3) achieve domestic tranquility (4) prove the existence of God!
Then again, maybe not ;-)
Most likely the devil is in the pronoun. I think the population will self-segregate into a leader class and a loser class. As the old social rules disappear, people will pair off on the basis of IQ, income, ambition, education, and appearance.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe old rules forced a regression to the mean. The new rules will produce a double humped curve if WW3 is stalled long enough.
What interested me as a Dutchman is that the dutch conscripts had a significant higher rise in IQ points (seven versus there per decade between 1952 and 1982) then average. Apart from being proud I wonder why, does anybody has a clue?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHarry de Bont