Given that a substantial amount of intellectual ability is inherited, it might surprise you to learn that intelligence test scores have been rising dramatically for about a century. On an IQ scale where 100 is the average, scores have been rising about 3 points per decade, meaning if your grandparent scored 100, the average score for your generation would be around 115. That's a pretty big difference-about a standard deviation, meaning someone from your grandparent's generation whose score was at the 84th percentile would be only average (50th percentile) by today's norms. But don't think for a minute that we are necessarily smarter.
James Flynn is a New Zealand researcher and trained political philosopher credited with first documenting the rising scores. He reported the results in 1984, when he found that almost everyone who took a well-validated IQ test in the 1970s did better than those who took one in the 1940s. His findings became known as the Flynn effect. Now Flynn is saying that though the scores continue to rise, it would "probably be better to say that we are "more modern" than "smarter." The fact is that we're not getting better at everything, he reported recently. A modem mind simply takes a scientific approach to problems, with abstract classification, logic, and imaginative hypothetical reasoning. The prescientific mind was utilitarian, on the other hand, and concentrated on the uses for things.
This change in our mental processes may actually have a greater impact on the rising scores than better educational opportunities do. Flynn reports that our ability to do puzzles identify similarities, and process nonverbal symbols and visual images has increased, but not our ability to calculate arithmetic. Adults today have broader vocabularies and possess greater general information than in previous generations, but children do not, compared to children in previous generations. The Flynn effect has been shown to be valid in most countries in which it has been tested, even in less-developed countries. Recently, Flynn reported a strong rise in scores in Kenya and Saudi Arabia, but a slower rise in Sudan and Brazil.
Before you chide your elders for what you think must be a differential in your favor, however, consider your future. IQ is not static throughout a person's lifetime, and it might just be a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. In general, verbal intelligence rises until middle age then slowly declines-but at different rates across individuals. Someone with a high IQ will have a much slower decline than a person with lower IQ; in his or her 80s and 90s, the high scorer's verbal intelligence will about equal that of his or her teen years. Unfortunately for your elders and maybe for you too, the reverse is true for analytical intelligence: It peaks in adolescence.
Despite the strong heritability of IQ, researchers continue to pursue mechanisms that might raise IQ scores, chief among them the pursuit of finer educational systems for youth and adult alike. Factors like regular physical exercise and brain exercises (even videogames) seem to boost brain power, at least temporarily. Other recent research in neuroscience has had difficulty pinpointing physical mechanisms that can boost IQ, although researchers propose that a focus on brain chemicals like dopamine may lead, in time, to drugs that can do so chemically.
Questions
1. Do you believe people are really getting smarter? Why or why not?
2. How do you reconcile Flynn's recent description of the modem mind with the General Social?
Survey's findings that U.S. adults perform poorly on scientific questions and aren't knowledgeable about scientific method?
3. If the Flynn effect is real, does this undermine the theory that IQ is mostly inherited? Why or why not?