James R. Flynn is an accidental IQ specialist. In the early 1980s, the American-born political scientist, a longtime New Zealander, thought he might spend a few pages in a planned book on “how to defend humane ideals” grappling with the argument that the gap in IQ scores between blacks and whites was genetically rooted.
It was not his first foray into that subject, but this time, as he dug into international intelligence-test data, he came across a puzzling trend: Although the tests were calibrated so that 100 was always the average, the underlying performance was moving steadily upward. Were people getting smarter?
Mr. Flynn has calculated that, had they taken a circa-2000 IQ test, Americans in 1900 would have scored a 67, suggesting mental enfeeblement. But your grandparents (or great-grandparents) probably did not come across as mental midgets in their day. What was going on?
So much for a brief detour. More than three decades later, Mr. Flynn is still trying to nail down what it means to be smart, and his legacy is almost surely going to be the “Flynn effect,” the term Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein applied to the rising-IQ phenomenon in The Bell Curve.
“I could tell when I first hit on it back in the ‘80s how explosive the idea was,” says Mr. Flynn, now 78 and an emeritus professor at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. “But I thought someone would come up with a theory of intelligence that would explain it. Then they didn’t.”
So the task fell to him. Of course, he has had some fellow travelers, falling on a spectrum from those who think there is a single, unified engine of intelligence, determined largely by genetics—and who tend to see the Flynn effect as a sideshow—to those who believe that the results of IQ tests have always been shaped by social and cultural factors (with the Flynn effect being just one more example).
Digging a ‘Gigantic Hole’
Spending so much of his life on the question of IQ “has been about as welcome as being drafted to help dig a gigantic hole to the center of the earth,” Mr. Flynn writes in his new book, Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press). Yet he remains an energetic participant in the IQ wars: The new book summarizes his past work, jousts with critics, and proposes new puzzles. For instance: Why are adults doing better on IQ subtests that measure vocabulary, while their children (raised by those same literate adults) are not?
Mr. Flynn was not the first to notice IQ gains in the 20th century. That honor seems to belong to Read Tuddenham, a research psychologist who spotted score increases by U.S. Army recruits between World War I and World War II. Yet Mr. Flynn ignited an entire branch of research, and has offered the most comprehensive collection of data.
To take one example, he has shown that American children and adults saw their scores on certain influential tests of intelligence rise by 15 to 17 points from the late 1940s and early ‘50s into the 2000s. (According to some guidelines, the difference between 100 and 115 is the difference between a borderline high-school graduate and someone bound for a competitive college and a professional career.) In Dutch data, on a test of pattern-recognition known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, there was an even more astonishing jump: 20 points over a mere 30 years. The average Dutch test taker in 1982 would have fallen into the 90th percentile in 1952.
Curiously, the gains were heavily concentrated on the most-abstract parts of IQ tests—those that asked people to identify geometric patterns, for example, or similarities in words.
By now, documentation of the Flynn effect extends to a large swath of the developed world, as well as several developing countries.
In his new book, Mr. Flynn dips into controversies involving race and IQ, and gender and IQ. Some scholars have cited his work as proof that black-white differences on IQ tests are environmentally rooted. He tends to think that they are, but says the Flynn effect does not by itself demonstrate that.
Arthur R. Jensen, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, may be the best-known advocate of the view that IQ tests measure an innate, stable intelligence (which scholars in the field refer to as “g”); that those differences are largely genetic; and that there are race-based differences in such abilities.
Mr. Flynn concedes that IQ tests, in any given year, are reasonably well suited to predicting who will make good college material. “But,” he adds, “we shouldn’t think of IQ tests over time as measurements of intelligence, precisely. We should think of them as picking up the sociology of the 20th century—and in that way they are priceless artifacts.”
His explanation is that the modern world, including modern schools, has taught us to see the world through what he calls “scientific spectacles": We divide it in taxonomic ways, rewarded on IQ tests. Teachers train students from the earliest grades to think methodically and scientifically. That would help to explain the particular rise in the more-abstract subtests.
Does that mean we’re “smarter”? To Flynn the question is semantic, but what’s unassailable is that we confront a different set of cognitive problems during our school and work lives than our predecessors did.
Interviewed in the 1920s by the psychologist Alexander R. Luria, Russian peasants were unable to say what birds and fish had in common: They couldn’t get beyond thinking of the animals’ practical roles or their own interactions with them. (“A person can eat a fish but not a crow,” one befuddled respondent commented, puzzling out the answer.)
Giving a more personal example, Mr. Flynn estimates that his own father, who was born in 1885 and left school “between 11 and 13,” would probably score 70 on an IQ test today, implying that he couldn’t make change or get a driver’s license.
Quite the contrary; he did the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen, Mr. Flynn says. Yet he was unable to process hypothetical arguments. In arguments about racial equality in which his father defended segregation, Mr. Flynn recalls, his father could not grasp that he might feel differently if he woke up the next day with black skin. “He would say, ‘When has that ever happened?’”
“I would defy you to find a racist today who would not immediately accept a hypothetical argument,” Mr. Flynn says. They would “see that they are being challenged to use reason detached from the concrete.”
Continuing Debate
Few question the data underpinning the Flynn effect, yet its causes and implications remain very much up for grabs. It is “the single most important finding pointing to an environmental effect on IQ,” says Richard E. Nisbett, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
The outlines of the “scientific spectacles” argument ring true to Eric Turkheimer, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. “We live in a society that puts a lot of demands on us to deal with abstractions,” he says, “but doesn’t put a lot of demands on us to recall facts or do arithmetic in our heads. And therefore we have improved a lot on one and not so much on the other.”
Yet Mr. Jensen has written that “the Flynn effect ... will go down in history as a blind alley in psychometrics.” He has tended to attribute the rise in IQ scores to the public’s growing familiarity with taking tests.
Linda Gottfredson, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware, views the Flynn effect as something more significant than that. “There’s something going on we don’t understand. It’s a puzzle, and I love puzzles,” she says. But she insists that the Flynn effect hardly upends the decades of work demonstrating that a core intelligence seems to underpin all IQ tests, and that moving the needle of that intelligence through social intervention has proved devilishly hard.
In a sense, she says, Mr. Flynn’s interpretation of the effect represents a step backward in intelligence research because it encourages people to think of intelligence as a bunch of unrelated attributes. (All intelligence tests correlate, but the degree to which that reflects either a natural fact about the brain or a statistical artifact lies at the heart of the IQ debate.)
Ms. Gottfredson speculates that the Flynn effect represents something real, genetically based, and yet not a core component of “g.” That, too, would explain why there have been no evident increases in practical smarts.
The causes of the Flynn effect are less important than its results when it comes to a project Mr. Flynn is passionate about: Over the last decade he has tried to get U.S. courts to take his research into account when determining whether a convict should be ineligible for the death penalty. Since the Supreme Court’s Atkins v. Virginia case outlawed capital punishment for the mentally disabled, courts have leaned toward the view that the bottom 2.25 percent or so of IQ scorers, with scores of 70 or below, might reasonably be considered unable to evaluate the consequences of their actions. (Expert witnesses have also weighed in on individual cases.)
But Mr. Flynn has shown that whether a convict hits that threshold depends heavily on when he or she took the test, and when it was last normed. Correcting for old tests and outdated norming would push more convicts into the bottom 2.25 percent, but the larger point is the inherent danger of basing such a monumental judgment on the sands of shifting IQ data.
Some federal appeals courts have ruled that lower district courts may take the Flynn effect into account, but that they need not. A pending case in Texas—involving a man, Eric DeWayne Cathey, who was sentenced to death in 1997 for kidnapping and murdering a young woman—may set an important precedent in that state’s courts for whether a convict’s test scores should be adjusted for the Flynn effect. An opinion may come down this year.
Fresh Questions
On a more intellectual level, breaking down IQ tests into their constituent parts has allowed Mr. Flynn to uncover fresh mysteries. The incongruity between rising adult vocabulary scores and flatlining scores for kids and teenagers? Mr. Flynn suggests that the cause is the rise of a self-contained adolescent culture, birthed in the 1950s, that is “impervious to parents’ vocabulary.” (Mr. Nisbett finds this “a bit of a stretch” and says it could just as easily be explained by the dumbing down of elementary- and secondary-school textbooks.)
Mr. Flynn also thinks he’s found evidence of what he dubs a “bright tax” in the case of analytic ability. The smarter someone is in that subskill, the more that person’s scores appear to drop with age. People with average analytic scores appear to maintain those scores from ages 17 to 72, but those with very high scores see them drop as they age. There is no such falloff in verbal skills on the high end.
Mr. Flynn’s hypothesis is that, when the typical elderly retire, they confront far few analytic problems in their day-to-day lives, even as they continue to use language as much as ever.
On the even more polarizing subject of domestic racial differences, Mr. Flynn and William T. Dickens, of the Brookings Institution, reported evidence in Psychological Science in 2006 that the black-white IQ gap had closed by four to seven points from 1972 to 2002. That was immediately contested by Mr. Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, a University of Western Ontario psychologist whose intense interest in measuring racial differences was especially controversial. (He died in October.)
Given their longstanding disagreements, it may be surprising that Mr. Flynn dedicates his new book “to Arthur Jensen, whose integrity never failed,” and that he writes, in his concluding chapter: “Psychologists should thank Jensen for pursuing his lifelong mission, against great odds, to clarify the concept of g.”
“Jensen is an honest scholar,” Mr. Flynn says, and liberal academics do themselves no favors by declining to engage his work. It’s a scandal, he thinks, that so few American colleges include courses on the study of intelligence. “I get e-mails from young psychologists all the time, saying, ‘I assumed Rushton and Jensen must be right because everyone just called them names. Thank God you argue evidentially,’” he says.
Indeed, Mr. Flynn thinks that grappling with debates over black-white IQ differences ought to be something every college student undertakes.
Don’t hold your breath for IQ to become part of the core curriculum, however. Debates over IQ and race, or IQ and gender, remain too hot for that. And while many people think the Flynn effect shows that IQ is largely environmentally rooted, and therefore less politically toxic, a resolute minority remains unpersuaded. Flynn effect or no, the smart money says the IQ wars will continue to rage, in journals if not undergraduate classrooms.
