Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century

by James R. Flynn

The ‘Flynn effect' is a surprising finding, identified by James R. Flynn, that IQ test scores have significantly increased from one generation to the next over the past century. Flynn now brings us an exciting new book which aims to make sense of this rise in IQ scores and considers what this tells us about our intelligence, our minds and society. Are We Getting Smarter? features fascinating new material on a variety of topics including the effects of intelligence in the developing world; the impact of rising IQ scores on the death penalty, cognitive ability in old age, and the language abilities of youth culture; as well as controversial topics of race and gender. He ends with the message that assessing IQ goes astray if society is ignored. As IQ scores continue to rise into the 21st century, particularly in the developing world, the ‘Flynn effect' marches on!

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Education, Sociology

321 pages, Hardcover

First published September 6, 2012

About the author

James Robert Flynn, PhD, aka Jim Flynn, is Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, researches intelligence and is famous for his publications about the continued year-after-year increase of IQ scores throughout the world, which is now referred to as the Flynn effect. The Flynn Effect is the subject of a multiple author monograph published by the American Psychological Association in 1998. Originally from Washington DC and educated in Chicago, Flynn emigrated to New Zealand in 1963.

Reviews

[Steven Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wikipedia defines the "Flynn Effect" thus: "The Flynn effect is the substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day." In this book, James Flynn explores why IQ may be increasing and what the implications are.

Flynn himself explains what his book intends to accomplish (Page 1): "Whatever we are doing, we are making massive IQ gains from one generation to another. . .This book attempts to make sense of what time and place are doing to our minds." This book may be slow going for the novice, but it is an important work, one raising many provocative questions.

The Flynn Effect begins with the determination that as intelligence tests are revised, the standard for average performance (100 is calculated as the average score) are set based on people who take the tests. Over time, IQ scores rise. Even though the average (mean) score on different versions of IQ tests over time is 100, the scores over time need to be recalibrated to keep the mean at 100. So the mean stays the same--but the test takers are “smarter” than their predecessors. In that sense, people have been getting smarter. It is not only in the developed world that IQ gains have been ascertained; in many developing nations, IQ has also increased. To give a sense of how profound the changes have been, take the Netherlands. Compare IQ scores in 1982 with those from 1952. The person who got an average score (in the middle of the range of IQs) in 1982 would have scored higher than 90% of all Dutch in 1952.

Why the increases? Flynn believes that the Industrial Revolution and modernizing industry is a part of the explanation. He even notes that some have suggested that certain video games and computer applications may have sharpened people's minds. In short, events in the environment are key to explaining the increase. Do you argue that TV shows how dopey people actually are? Flynn cites a study showing that TV shows now are much more complex than before. He suggests comparing "I Love Lucy" with "Hill Street Blues." The latter demands much more from an audience as compared to the former. In many respects, life today demands more cognitive complexity from people, and this leads to using their inherent cognitive power at a higher level. An increasingly complex social world is a part of the explanation, then.

Many issues are joined in this book--such as the role of race in the discussion on intelligence, the role of nutrition in increased scores (with a surprising conclusion), the likely closing of the IQ gap between developed and developing nations, the effect of intelligence on violence, and so on.

This is an important book, albeit one that is more academic than easily accessible to non-academic readers. But the effort to understand how work will be richly rewarded.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

JDN 2456327 EDT 19:20.

We often say that a genius such as Leonardo or Newton is "ahead of their time"; I doubt most people realize just how accurate this is. In what is called "the Flynn effect", IQ scores have been increasing steadily at a rate of about 0.3 IQ points per year since we have been keeping track of them. This means that in the past century we have risen an average of 30 IQ points, which is the difference between average and the top 2.5%, or the difference between the bottom 8% and the top 8%.
We obviously haven't been increasing this fast since Newton and Leonardo; if we had, Newton's IQ of, say, 160 the year he died would be an IQ of only 74 today (borderline retarded). Leonardo's IQ of, say, 180 when he died would become a mere 30 today (chimpanzee). That's pretty ridiculous. So let's assume that the increase started around 1850; in that case we spot them the same 50 IQ points, and Newton's 160 becomes 110 while Leonardo's 180 becomes 130. They'd still be smart, but not outlier geniuses. And indeed, if you tested them on standard IQ tests, I'm pretty sure that's what you'd find.
In Are We Getting Smarter? James R. Flynn (yes, the effect is named after him) charts this meteoric rise, and seeks to answer the question on all of our minds: Is this a real rise in intelligence, an artifact of bad tests, or something else?
Flynn leans toward "something else," but he also thinks "real rise in intelligence" is worth considering. He pretty clearly demolishes the idea that it's just bad tests; we ask the same questions today we did 50 years ago, and people just plain do better at answering them. Moreover, these aren't questions that require a lot of domain-specific knowledge; they're things like pattern completion and recalling strings of numbers. The most domain-specific category is the vocabulary section, and it's based on words that have been in common use for decades.
Flynn's theory is that the change has been abstraction, or what he calls "scientific spectacles"; we train people better now to think in terms of scientific categories and abstract relationships. Consider the question, "What do a fish and a crow have in common?" Most people used to say "A crow can eat a fish", which is very concrete and won't score well on an IQ test. Now most people say "Both are animals", which is more abstract and scores higher. High-IQ people say "Both are vertebrates", which is abstract, precise, and scientific.
Flynn also thinks we could do even better at teaching scientific attitudes than we already do, and I'm inclined to agree, given the prevalence of Creationism and global warming denial. But even I have to admit, today's Creationists use more scientific language than the Creationists of yesteryear. It's bad science, pseudoscience; but it shows how highly valued science is in our culture. You simply can't get away with saying "Science is of the devil" anymore, you have to say "Science reinforces the Bible".
I would hope that the steady rise in world IQ (which varies from nation to nation) would silence the sort of people who believe in an Idiocracy-style eugenic crisis where our population becomes dumber over time. But of course it won't. In fact IQ is inversely correlated with birth rate, but it's also inversely correlated with death rate, so it's not clear that people with less IQ actually have any more children who survive to breeding age. But even if that turns out to be the case, the fact remains that overall IQ scores are rising at a remarkably fast rate due to environmental pressures. If our genes are making us dumber, our environment is making us smarter a lot faster.
The book itself is full of data tables and statistics, which makes it a little dry. You can't fault his scientific rigor, but beware that you will be bombarded with long lists of means and standard deviations. Also he has a tendency to report things like "3.284 plus or minus 1.261", which is a really weird kind of precision. How about "3.3 plus or minus 1.3", seeing as we already have a wide margin of error?
The reader is kept awake, however, but Flynn's fascinating insights and his occasional barbs at academic culture. He clearly doesn't like a lot of things about how our academic community is organized. He goes through long lists of papers that contain basic factual errors, and spares no criticism for university administrators and funding agencies. It's hard not to agree, given some of the examples of bad science he talks about that have gotten published. My favorite is this one: "The silliest piece of social science I have seen was not in psychology but in politics: a thesis on nonvoting in the Washington metropolitan area. The candidate was unaware that the Hatch Act banned the residents of the city proper, the District of Columbia, from voting in Congressional elections. [...] They constituted one-fourth of those sampled. The supervisor's attempt to defend the merits of the thesis was fascinating." (p.181) In short, why is voter turnout so low in DC? Maybe because people who live in DC aren't allowed to vote? Who published that paper!? They should be fired.
A large section of the book is dedicated to showing that the measured differences in IQ between White males and others are due to sociological, rather than genetic, causes. Flynn chides other IQ researchers for leaping to genetic conclusions; but he also chides others for not being willing to face the facts and do the actual research at all. Rather than assuming that genes are not the cause, we should be able to marshal evidence for that; and this is what Flynn tries to do. His case is pretty convincing; the sociological evidence is compelling, and the opposing arguments are pathetically weak. At times I felt that he actually went too far in the direction of being charitable to his opponents, some of whom clearly are racists and sexists. If you're going to be so harsh against papers with bad statistics, how about you direct some of that toward blatant racism?
One argument that keeps turning up is that because IQ is highly heritable, it must be largely genetic. This argument is not just wrong; it's ludicrous, as can be seen from a simple example. The heritability of the trait "speaking Japanese" is quite high, as you might imagine; most people who speak Japanese had parents who spoke Japanese, and most people who speak Japanese have children who speak Japanese. However, speaking Japanese is entirely environmental; as long as you have the basic genetics required for speaking any human language (you are not so retarded as to be nonverbal, your ears and mouth work normally), you can learn Japanese just as well as anyone else if you are exposed to it from a young enough age. Japanese parents who adopt an American child will have no problem raising that child to speak Japanese.
Yes, smart people tend to raise smart children. This because they live in smart environments, provide smart opportunities, and live in smart nations. It could also be because they carry smart genes, but you need to actually show that; it doesn't by any means follow from the heritability coefficient itself.
My favorite chapter of the book is chapter 7, "The sociological imagination", in which Flynn derides other researchers in psychology for being greedy reductionists who ignore cultural and social causes and try to make everything about brain physiology. I've been saying this for years, and I will continue to say it; trying to understand human behavior purely in terms of the brain would be like trying to understand the Internet purely in terms of quantum mechanics. Humanity really needs to get over the long-standing mistake that things are defined by the stuff of which they are made, and not by the function that they do. You are made of neurons, yes; but that does not mean you are neurons. A house is made of wood, but a pile of wood is not a house. A vat full of neurons would not be Mozart.
It's the failure of sociological imagination that leads to another ludicrous argument Flynn's opponents make, which once again he gives more credit than it deserves: Women and Black people couldn't score lower for sociological reasons unless there were some mysterious "factor X" that only affected them and not White males, something highly implausible and impossible to verify. What mysterious phenomenon harms Blacks and not Whites, women and not men, gays but not straights? I wonder what it could be? It's called discrimination, you idiot. It's not mysterious at all. (And indeed, as Flynn shows, countries that discriminate less show smaller differences in IQ scores between various groups.)
It's particularly amusing how he shows that the fact that women in college have a lower mean IQ than men in college doesn't mean that women are dumber in general; instead, it just means that women have an easier time getting into college without being as bright. On average, women are the same as men in IQ; it's just that women can get into college with an IQ of 95, while men need an IQ of 100. Flynn uses data on dropout rates and conscientiousness scores to argue that the reason is basically that women work harder, and as a result can pass the thresholds into college without having as much raw intellect. This certainly meshes with my own experience; everyone I know who is brilliant but lazy is male, while everyone I know who is of average intellect but works their ass off to succeed is female. Personally, I'm working on being brilliant and industrious both... but how the laziness tempts.
The chapter I feel most ambivalent about is chapter 4, "Death, memory, and politics", in which Flynn tries to argue that we should adjust our IQ thresholds for the death penalty in light of the Flynn effect. I did not know this before, but apparently it is illegal in the US to execute someone whose IQ is below 70, on the grounds that below that level they must be mentally retarded and unable to understand the consequences of their behavior.
It seems to me that this system is really founded upon an outdated concept of free will, in which you must be "really responsible" for your actions before it's legitimate to punish you for them. We can't execute someone who is too stupid to understand why they murder people! Well, why not? After all, they murder people, and we don't know how to stop them. These, for me, are pretty much the reasons we'd execute someone. I'm not terribly concerned about the question of whether they murder people rationally; indeed, it's pretty clear to me that almost no murders are rational, because it could only be rational to murder someone in a society where murder wasn't reliably punished severely. Even then, it would still be wrong, but at least maybe it could be rational. (And don't try to pull out self-defense or just war exceptions: Those are by definition not murder, and wouldn't carry a death penalty. In fact, they are usually not prosecuted at all.)
If you can find a better way to stop the murders, well, let's do that instead. But then, this raises the question: Why not always do that? Why kill some murderers and not others? If imprisonment works just as well as execution, why use execution at all, knowing it is costly, controversial, and irrevocable?
It would make some sense to me to execute psychopaths and not others, as we know that psychopaths are especially dangerous and especially likely to charm parole boards into releasing them. And I suppose it's probably true that murderers of higher IQ are more likely to be psychopaths (this could certainly be tested easily enough). But we have standard tests of psychopathy, which are not dependent on IQ and don't show the Flynn effect over time. (Oddly enough, tests of narcissism do show a Flynn-like effect, in that certain narcissistic traits have become more common in the population over time. We're not really sure about the causes or the significance of this; it could well be another book worth writing.)
Also, Flynn's argument that we should adjust scores to the current averages doesn't quite sit right with me. It seems to rest upon a notion that moral responsibility is a purely relative measure, which isn't true. Homo sapiens are smarter than Pan troglodytes, which are smarter than Canis lupus. As such, we grant more rights and responsibilities to humans than to chimps, and more to chimps than to dogs. But if the world were changed somehow so that all the really stupid animals died out (all the insects and worms are gone, but somehow we survive without them), we would not thereby conclude that dogs deserve fewer rights because they're now closer to the bottom. Likewise, if human beings died out, it would be wrong to say that chimpanzees should vote and fly airplanes because they are now the smartest apes (Planet of the Apes notwithstanding).
If IQ is really important to moral responsibility, then rises in IQ should also entail rises in moral responsibility. And if it isn't, why are we using it to decide who gets executed? Flynn tries to argue that what we really care about is retardation, which (he presumes) isn't decreasing over time, always representing a steady 2.5% of the population. He then makes the additional assumption that retarded people would always score lower on IQ tests than non-retarded people, even as all the IQ scores rapidly improve over time. Both of these assumptions strike me as entirely unsupported; maybe the IQ gains are actually due at least in part to improved treatment and prevention for mental retardation! In any case, if we're not going to base our decisions on IQ tests, how about we come up with a new test that actually measures what we really care about?
In fact, Flynn himself hints at the idea that rising IQ should entail rising moral responsibility, though not in so many words. He briefly analyzes the history of political debate, showing that the complexity of arguments used has increased over time, especially in arguments used by politicians and economists toward one another. He particularly compares William Jennings Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, which is rhetorically brilliant but almost content-free, with more modern economic commentators like Paul Krugman, who regularly cites tables and graphs. Apparently, the arguments that politicians give the masses aren't changed as much, which is rather disappointing but not terribly surprising. ("Change we can believe in!" I like Obama for the most part, but come on; what does that even mean? "It's not a coincidence that you use R to go back and D to go forward!" Yes, actually, that's exactly what it is.) Also, there's a study saying that the Tea Party caucus displays a lower level of cognitive complexity than mainstream Republicans or Democrats, which is amusing but also not surprising.
With this in mind, the future is bright: We can predict that a smarter population will also be a morally better one. As support, I offer Pinker's observation in Better Angels of Our Nature that violence is decreasing over time. Science shows people are getting smarter and nicer! How's that for good news?

[Richard]

Professor Flynn famously detected that I.Q. scores have been steadily rising since they were first created (known as the Flynn Effect), destroying any prior belief that they were genetically determined. His focus over the years has been to disentangle the effects of upbringing and culture from biology.

He was interviewed by the Scientific American podcast Science Talk, available on the web, as well as on the Australian Broadcasting show All in The Mind, available at abc.net.edu (mp3 and transcript), or on iTunes.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intelligence testing was invented in the early 20th century. By convention, the mean of population-wide scores is set to 100, and the standard deviation to 15. The salient fact about them is that the scores have been continuously increasing in every country, and the test have to be re-normed every few decades. Without re-norming, the average American score would have risen 30 points in a century, and for a particular subtest, 50 scores, so an average person from 1918 would have scored like a borderline retarded person in 2018, and an average person from 2018 like a professor in 1918. However, this is ridiculous! An average person in 1918 was obviously smarter than a borderline retarded person in 2018, and the professors who developed modern physics circa 1918 were obviously smarter than an average person in 2018. How can this be? Change of culture, says Flynn. Western culture circa 2018 is far more scientific, abstract, classifying, built on hypotheticals than Western culture circa 1918, which was grounded in concrete experiences and specific knowledge to a far greater extent; exposure to modern culture is, to some extent, what the tests measure.

If test scores within the same group at the same time largely reflect heredity, how could there be such gigantic differences in scores between different times? Positive feedback loops between heredity and environment, which were different in different times. Imagine a person whose genes predispose him to like reading books, who reads books, which make him want to read more, and so on. How much this person actually reads will depend on the price and availability of books, which was different in different epochs. Now, it is possible that the difference in scores between different ethnic groups during the same time period has the same causes; we don't know. Maybe this explanation is wrong, says Flynn, but attempts to shut down research will lead nowhere.

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 3 out of 5]

The big idea (or observation) is that IQ gains for populations in the developed and developing world, have been massive in the C20th century; so much so that an 'average' score in 1910 in the USA, if scored today in the USA would be within the bottom 2% of scores, and qualify as 'mental retardation'. What this means is up for debate, but every 10 years the IQ norm is adjusted up three points to accommodate this change. What humans have become massively better at is pattern recognition and abstract thinking. Flynn explores the data and suggests some possible reasons for this.

The text and ideas within it are largely contained in Dr Flynn's Ted talk - which is important and excellent. There are some really quite uncomfortable passages about race and gender. In hindsight just watching the Ted talk is probably enough to get the picture.

[Rebekah]

Bo-ring. As I read, I developed an increasing sense of dislike for the author, who is immensely convinced of the the import of IQ patterns in sociology. At the end, I didn't find the subject super pressing and I had actually been hoping to read a treatise on the merits of using IQ to evaluate "smartness", not a long list of statistical findings on IQ versus insert-demographic-here.

[Alfred · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard not to like James Flynn. His book "Are We Getting Smarter?" Is about the Flynn Effect, the rising IQ of subsequent generations in recent history. He points out that the gains are generally on the non-g element of intelligence tests, suggesting an environmental cause for the increase over time. This environmental cause is then suggested to be "scientific spectacles" or the idea that people in advanced society are now learning from a very young age to view the world hypothetically, categorically and analytically.

He approaches arguments in good faith and also assumes the same of those he stands opposed to.

The book is dedicated to Arthur Jensen, "whose integrity never failed".

He also states:

"I look forward to a world in which we are all treated as individuals and I know that Arthur Jensen and Richard Lynn share that vision."

I recently read Lynn's book "Sex Differences in Intelligence" which was interesting and made a good case for the slower development of males and slight IQ advantage of around 5 point over women in adulthood.
Flynn makes a good point when he points out that the cohorts that were tested and compared were not all tested and compared at the same point in history. Women in 1940 will of course have scored lower than men in 1990. He goes through the data and accounts for the Flynn Effect. I found his data convincing, however I agree with the central argument in the book which appears to be that more intelligence research is needed.

His arguments against the genetic basis of differences in intelligence between racial groups was well presented and strong, though I think his use of analogy was ineffective and, though I remain open to the hypothesis, I am still not convinced the difference is purely environmental in origin due to the strong case that has been presented to the contrary. Again, more research into this could help put the debate to rest. I agree with Flynn's assertion that environmentalists are their own worst enemy in that they refuse to delve into this area of psychological research, meaning there is little counter evidence to refute the hereditarian hypothesis.

This book is data heavy and unlikely to be gripping for the casual reader.

[Kezia Olive · Rating 5 out of 5]

The same question is what I'd like to impose to my own country - are we getting smarter, just as (almost) everyone else?

Finished reading this because my interest guided me to choose the topic for an assignment, and I love how casually Flynn wrote the book to address the dialogues (or the lack thereof) about human intelligence.
It might not be a book you pick up if you're not interested in cognition or psychology, but if you do, you'll enjoy the conversations he tried to have to debunk the misconceptions about intelligence.

(and yes, my essay answered my first question!)

[Ed Crutchley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apart from being an eye-opener and marvellously thought provoking, this is quite an uplifting book; any sagging faith in the human race you might have had is at least partially restored. As our minds become increasingly challenged and exercised by modern-day life, we are far from being in mental decline. No phenomenon of future shock so far, so it would seem. The author is responsible for the now-accepted ‘Flynn effect’ whereby, on a constant measurement basis, IQ scores continue to improve by 0.3 points per year (for example, the USA gained in IQ from 67 points in 1900 to 100 today). Work environment seems to be more important than education. We learn differences between countries, the effects of urbanisation, and variations with age. We hear how the subject has involved Flynn as an expert witness fighting life-and-death cases regarding death-row prisoners in the USA (where an IQ score below 70 denotes mental retardation and therefore exemption form the death penalty). In a sea of statistics cleverly presented so as not to put us off too much but to add weight to his arguments, Flynn analyses phenomena arising from IQ tests and dispels some myths (re nutrition, gender, race, etc). He explains why, for example, developing nations lag behind, including mention of recent findings related to the strong correlation between IQ and country levels of ‘parasitic stress’). We learn about the significant effect of heredity; the teenager effect that has appeared in developed nations since 1950; about bright tax (more rapid decline of analytical skills with age for bright people); the discovery that experienced London taxi drivers experience exceptional growth of the hippocampus area of the brain. Because statistics are so important (measure of IQ is relative, not absolute) we are made aware of the failure of many IQ studies to properly take into account particularities related to the population they have studied before making claims. For example, Flynn cites the study that proved that duller Maryland 8th graders drove cars, whereas the correct picture was that those who had fallen behind were, unlike their classmates, old enough to be allowed to drive.
For newcomers like myself, I recommend beforehand a good read of Wikipedia articles on IQ, g-factor, and Raven’s Progressive Matrices, because they get mentioned so often. Also recommended is a similar read on Arthur Jensen, so often cited and to whom the book is dedicated despite all his differences with the author.
One reaction I had towards the end of the book (179 pages are devoted to the text, the rest to references and tables derived from past studies) was that the role of motivation is not specifically highlighted in relation to IQ improvement.

[Thomas Edmund · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am happy to have had the privilege of hearing Mr Flynn speak, presenting a lecture on the topic of this book. It was a bizarre experience to be honest, I left the theater thinking "oh wow what a fascinating concept" further down the track I tried to explain the lecture to a friend and was like "Uh, hurdle jumpers, sprinters, general fitness, something, something, something dark side"

Luckily this book was marginally better, by which I mean I could repeat back some of the information presented in this piece (some.) Mr Flynn's writing is dense to say the least, even compared to textbooks.

Nonetheless this is an enjoyable read. Flynn has an unusual technique of almost abruptly introducing a highly controversial or politically charged implication of his work, concepts which made the statistical material bearable.

Its hard to recommend this book as I imagine that most will find it a challenging read, but if one feels psychologically ambitious then this is the piece for you.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although written in an academic style, this book raises many current issues impacted by IQ and measuring intelligence. The author gives his analysis and arguments, based in statistical analysis of test data, for such trends as the rising of IQ scores in the 20th century; relative scores between races, the sexes, young and old, and developed/developing countries; the importance of correcting low IQ scores since they are used in capital punishment decisions; and the importance of taking sociological factors into account rather than only focusing on individual psychology or reducing all explanations to physiology. Just the other day I read a newspaper article about a law suit where the state of Florida is refusing to correct IQ scores because officials wish to be able to execute more prisoners; this book provided the context to understand the arguments on both sides.

[Darnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Though opaquely-written, this book isn't as impenetrable as people suggested to me. As a whole, it's fascinating. I also appreciated how data-driven it was: where most books would take a basic finding and extrapolate into other areas, in almost all cases Flynn instead finds further data that could confirm or dis-confirm the idea.

For those who want less math or who are less interested, Flynn's TED Talk contains a significant number of the most interesting pieces:
http://www.ted.com/talks/james_flynn_...

[Sandy Sopko · Rating 3 out of 5]

As others have indicated, it was academic and less accessible for the general reader, it was dense and requires a reader to wear his/her "math hat" and use "scientific spectacles" (Flynn's term), but important and thought-provoking reading, especially Flynn's conclusions about the importance of society in any discussion of intelligence.

[MikeFromQueens · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Flynn Affect is throughout this book - many examples, and in depth statistics. Sometimes it was hard to continue because of that, but then this book was about including the source data to bolster the theory/hypothesis/interpretations. Yes - viva the complexity of modern life!

[Jeremy Mettler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proof read please
Wow, what a "dense" read but it was interesting and caused me to think a lot. Glad I read it. Wish I read as part of a book study so I could have talked about it with others, may have helped clarify some of it. Recommend it as a group read.

[Steve Bennett · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gave up