Be "in" with the Intellectual crowd. Know about the "Flynn Effect." Were they really stupid back in Roman Times?
January 13, 1999
Flynn's Effect
Intelligence scores are rising, James R. Flynn discovered--but he remains very sure we're not getting any smarter
By Marguerite Holloway - Scientific American
Just back from teaching, James R. Flynn darts into his office to write down a revelation about Marx, free will, Catholicism and the development of the steam engine that came to him in the midst of his lecture. Busily scribbling, the professor of political science at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, declares that extemporaneous talking leads to creative thinking and new ideas. His pronouncement made, Flynn--who, it should be noted, talks for a living--is ready to discuss the insight that made him famous: the observation that intelligence quotients, as measured by certain tests, have been steadily growing since the turn of the century.
Flynn's carefully documented findings have provoked a sort of soul-searching among many in the psychological and sociological communities. Before Flynn published his research in the 1980s, IQ tests had their critics. In general, however, the tests were viewed as imperfect yet highly helpful indicators of a person's acuity and various mental abilities or lack thereof. But after the widespread discussion of the eponymous Flynn effect, nothing has been the same. Debates roil about what the tests really measure, what kinds of intelligence there are, whether racial differences persist and, if IQ truly is increasing, why and what the political and social implications are.
"It is transforming work," comments Ulric Neisser of Cornell University, editor of The Rising Curve. The recent book, which emerged from a 1996 American Psychological Association symposium, reviews the Flynn effect and the various explanations for it--including better nutrition and parenting, more extensive schooling, improved test-taking ability, and the impact of the visual and spatial demands that accompany a television-laden, video-game-rich world. Flynn himself doesn't particularly cotton to any of these explanations. Sitting in his office amid swells of books and papers, he looks very much like a wiry, irreverent Poseidon: gray curls, white beard, pale blue eyes and a kindly, contrary demeanor. A trident poses no challenge to the imagination. If the gains in intelligence are real, "why aren't we undergoing a renaissance unparalleled in human history?" he demands, almost irritably. "I mean, why aren't we duplicating the golden days of Athens or the Italian Renaissance?"
Flynn's own humanist beliefs led him to investigate IQ in the first place. During the 1950s, he was a civil-rights activist in Chicago, where he was political action co-chairman for the university branch of the NAACP while getting his doctorate. After that, he taught at Eastern Kentucky University and chaired the Congress of Racial Equality in Richmond, Ky. "As a moral and political philosopher, my main interest is how you can use reason and evidence against antihumane ideologues," he explains. "Prominent among these are racial ideologues because racism has been one of the chief challenges to egalitarian ideals over the ages."
Flynn claims his civil-rights involvement did not prove helpful to a young academic's job search. He and his wife, Emily--whose family had been active in the Communist Party and who, Flynn says, was no stranger to persecution--decided to find a country where they could feel comfortable. They decided on New Zealand: "It seemed to me much more like the sort of social democracy that I would want to live in.
Once they settled into their new home and had started raising their two children, Flynn continued to fight American racism from afar. "I thought that in order to argue effectively with racist ideas, I had to look at the race-IQ debate, the claims that blacks, on average, are genetically inferior." He set out to refute Arthur R. Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley, one of the main proponents of that view. In 1980 Flynn published Race, IQ and Jensen, and the duel was on. He decided to follow up with a short monograph on military intelligence tests, because he had a hunch the data had been mishandled and that, in fact, black recruits were making large IQ gains on whites--a trend that would support Flynn's conviction that IQ was linked more to environmental factors than to genetic ones.
Sure enough, Flynn says he found a mistake in the way that some of the military data had been analyzed. But as he investigated further, he realized that Jensen and others would dismiss his findings on the grounds that military intelligence tests were--in contrast to other IQ tests--heavily educationally loaded. In other words, education played a big role in performance. Because black recruits were better educated in the 1950s than they were in the 1920s, any rise in their scores could be attributed to education, not to "real" IQ gains.
Flynn was undeterred. It would be a simple matter, he thought, to find a test measuring "genuine" intelligence that correlated with the military tests, thereby allowing him to use the data from the latter. There was no such correlation to be found, but in the process Flynn unearthed a gold mine. He discovered that certain IQ tests--specifically, the Stanford-Binet and Wechsler series--had new and old versions and that both were sometimes given to the same group of people. In the case of one of the Wechsler tests, for instance, the two versions had been given to the same set of children. The children did much better on the 1949 test than they did on the 1974 one. Everywhere Flynn looked, he noticed that groups performed much more intelligently on older tests. Americans had gained about 13.8 IQ points in 46 years, Flynn reported in 1984.
Although other researchers had noticed different aspects of the phenomenon, they had always explained it away. Flynn did not. "I think the main reason was that since I wasn't a psychologist, I didn't know what had to be true," he muses. "I came as an outsider and didn't have any preconceived notions." (Or, as psychologist Nathan Brody of Wesleyan University points out, there is always the explanation that Flynn, quite simply, "is a very good scholar with a very critical mind.")
WORLDWIDE IQ SCORES have been rising for more than 50 years
Critics, including Jensen, responded by saying that the tests must have higher educational loading than previously suspected. So Flynn looked at performance changes in a test called Raven Progressive Matrices, which measures what is called fluid g: on-the-spot problem solving that is not educationally or culturally loaded. These tests use patterns instead of, say, mathematics or words. "Polar Eskimos can deal with it," Flynn notes. "Kalahari bushmen can deal with it." Amazingly, it turned out that the highest gains were on the Raven. Flynn observed that in 14 countries--today he has data from at least 20--IQ was growing anywhere from five to 25 points in one generation. "The hypothesis that best fits the results is that IQ tests do not measure intelligence but rather correlate with a weak causal link to intelligence," Flynn wrote when he published the data. "So that was the 1987 article," he says, laughing, "and it, of course, put the cat among the pigeons.
Flynn has recently discovered another dramatic and puzzling increase in the scores of one of the Wechsler subtests--one that measures only verbal ability. Before this new finding, Flynn points out, the explanation that the Raven scores were rising because of video games or computer use had some plausibility. But now, he says, the mystery has only deepened.
Despite two decades of jousting with Jensen, Flynn says he has the deepest regard for the scholar and his scholarship. "There is a temptation on the liberal left not to want to look at the evidence," he remarks. "The fact is that if Arthur Jensen is right, there is a significant truth here about the real world to which we must all adapt." Flynn says he wants humanitarian egalitarian principles to reign "where I have the guts to face up to the facets of the real world. And if one of the facets is that blacks--on average, not individual--are genetically inferior for a kind of intelligence that pays dividends in the computer age, we would do well to know about it."
The next question is, of course, whether he believes such differences exist. In a flash, a sea change: "No! I do not!" Flynn nearly roars. In addition to his ongoing work on IQ, Flynn has been busy promulgating his ideals on other fronts. Disappointed with New Zealand's slouch toward pure capitalism, he has sought to stem the slide by running for Parliament. He has campaigned, and lost, three times. The most recent and, he adds, final attempt was in 1996 for the Alliance Party: "The only party in New Zealand that still believes in using taxation as a means of redistributing wealth and that still believes in single-payer health and education."
Flynn has also just finished a fifth book, entitled "How to Defend Humane Ideals", that he has been working on intermittently for many years. "Probably no one will be interested in it because people are much less interested in fundamental contributions than spectacular ones," Flynn rues. It would seem, however, that even merely spectacular results can fundamentally change things.
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