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Eureka!
by Matt Nippert
The past century has seen massive increases in IQ test scores. Professor James Flynn, discoverer of this “Flynn effect”, has endeavoured to solve the puzzle of why we’re getting smarter. Now he offers a new picture of human intelligence that is both surprising and illuminating.
Think of a dog, and then think of a rabbit. Quick: what do they have in common? If you immediately thought, “Rabbits and dogs both bear their young alive. Therefore, they are both mammals”, you’d score well on an Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test.
But James Flynn, international authority on intelligence theory and emeritus professor at Otago University, says that if you were asked the same question a hundred years ago your answer would almost certainly have been radically different: “You use dogs to hunt rabbits.”
Our grandparents would have done significantly worse on today’s IQ test, despite the practical nature of their answer, says Flynn. “How many of us hunt any more? Very few. It’s not like 1900 where all rural kids had hunting dogs and the population was mainly rural.”
After reading the marking guides, Flynn discovered that abstract, scientific answers get higher scores on today’s test. “I could see the answers they were giving credit for, and it was a terrible handicap to look for utilitarian connections,” he says. “The world is now meant to be classified – you detach logic from concrete reality.”
Thus our classification of dogs and rabbits has wide-ranging implications for our understanding of intelligence. Flynn, in his new book What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect, argues that the way we now see the world resolves the decades-old mystery that has plagued IQ researchers: are we really smarter than our ancestors?
Flynn, now 73, discovered in 1981 that IQ scores were steadily rising – a phenomenon that has become known inter‑nationally as the “Flynn effect”. This effect is present in every one of the more than 30 countries, including New Zealand, for which there is data.
The gains, he says, had been disguised ever since the tests became widely used in the early 1900s. How? Because of the convention that IQ scores are scaled to ensure that the average person scores exactly 100. Today, people sitting a test issued in 1900 would average 130.
The Flynn effect threw the academic subfield of intelligence theory into a tailspin, says Professor Nickolas Mackintosh of Cambridge University.
Flynn’s initial finding that today’s generation score better – suggesting that we are brighter than our forebears – “indeed overturned some received wisdom, and generated a considerable puzzle”, says Mackintosh, head of Cambridge’s department of experimental psychology.
Psychologists and critics thought that outsider Flynn – who trained as a moral philosopher and in 1981 headed the political science department at Otago – was barking up the wrong tree.
Some cognitive psychologists argued that the gains were entirely due to improvements in nutrition. Yet the effect persisted even during periods of wartime starvation in Japan and Europe. Others suggested that Flynn’s findings were entirely explained by the widespread expansion of compulsory education over the past century and had nothing to do with innate intelligence.
Flynn, in response, gathered more data to see whether the parts of IQ tests dependent on education (such as information retention and vocabulary) were responsible for the puzzling rise.
Raven’s Matrices, measuring an individual’s ability to place abstract shapes into a series, is considered to be the least educationally loaded intelligence test. Flynn says that in November 1984 he received a “bombshell” in his letterbox.
The letter in question was from a Dutch psychologist and showed vast improvements in Raven’s Matrices, dwarfing any other component of IQ. The Flynn effect was confirmed.
Kids are getting smarter in some measures of intelligence – though not markedly so at doing sums or general knowledge. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC), one of the most popular IQ tests, recorded surprisingly skewed gains across different categories. Although compulsory education has broadened over the period, the components of intelligence linked to formal schooling have seen the smallest gains (see box, page 21).
“This really threw the cat among the pigeons,” says Flynn. Although the Flynn effect appears to be slowing in some countries (those in Scandinavia) and accelerating in others (the developing world, especially Kenya), dozens of historic studies using outdated IQ tests not adjusted for the Flynn effect were immediately rendered junk science.
And since the US Supreme Court has ruled that, because they lack mental capacity, inmates with an IQ lower than 70 cannot be executed, Flynn has even been called as an expert witness in capital punishment cases. He adjusts the IQ scores of Death Row inmates downwards.
Most intriguingly, the Flynn effect laid bare a series of paradoxes that have befuddled theorists ever since. The level of gains, across every country for which there is data, suggests that nurture is far more important than nature. Yet studies also show a strong correlation between the IQs of identical twins raised apart – far higher than for fraternal twins raised in the same household – raising a tricky question. Flynn: “How can environment be both so feeble and so potent?”
And, of course, there’s the perplexing issue of the relative stupidity of our grandparents. As Flynn says, “Either the children of today are far brighter than their parents, or IQ tests are not a good measure of intelligence. And if children are brighter, why are we not struck by the extraordinary subtlety of our children’s conversation?”
When Flynn began seriously looking at intelligence, he showed little regard for the academic convention that scholars should stick to their disciplines.
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