The Troubling Trend of Cultural IQ

Mark Bauerlein

Any broad discussion of the American Mind has to take into account an extraordinary finding first noticed in the middle of the twentieth century and confirmed and publicized widely in the 1980s and beyond. From World War I to World War II, cognitive psychologists discovered, the average score of U.S. soldiers on mental tests rose significantly, and in the decades after that, scores on IQ tests continued the trend. It came to be known as the "Flynn Effect," named for New Zealand social scientist James R. Flynn, whose studies brought to widespread attention the intelligence gains by adults and children in the United States and elsewhere.

IQ tests always set the mean at 100, adjusting the scale accordingly over time so that it appears that test takers from year to year achieve the same cumulative score (a 100 places one at the fiftieth percentile). But if we were to maintain the same scale over the decades, without recalibrating it to keep the mean the same, we would find it rising, as follows for the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC):

100.00 (1947–48) 107.63 (1972) 113.00 (1989) 117.63 (2002)

And here are the scores for the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS):

100.00 (1953–54) 107.50 (1978) 111.70 (1995) 115.07 (2006)

An average child in 2002, that is, would have scored seventeen points above average in the late 1940s, while an average adult in 2006 would beat the average in the early 1950s by fifteen points. In other words, an average person in 2002 (the fiftieth percentile) would fall into the eighty-fifth percentile in the 1947–48 group. This advance is remarkable, one that few scientists would have thought possible. As Flynn's studies circulated in the 1980s and after, psychologists analyzed the data and pondered their causes and implications at length. What made American intelligence climb so rapidly, and will the gains continue? Do the numbers indicate that Americans are, in fact, getting smarter — more knowledgeable, critical, ingenious, and reflective?

Explanations for the rising scores have varied, with researchers advancing several factors in different proportions, including improvements in early childhood nutrition and education, more people going to college, reduced exposure to toxins (particularly lead), a more demanding cognitive environment in the workplace and in leisure activities (created by technology and media), and the expansion of practices of hypothesizing and abstract reasoning. Flynn favors the latter cause, noting that IQ test questions mostly ask people to detach facts from concrete situations and apply logic to them, identifying patterns, similarities, and analogies, not invoking real-world knowledge. They require subjects to perform certain mental operations — for instance, examining numbers in sequence and predicting the next one to come, or observing objects in two pictures and determining relationships between them, then looking at a third picture and selecting a fourth picture (out of five provided) that forms the same relationship to it. Knowledge helps, but mainly knowledge that supports abstract inferences (such as familiarity with classification schemes and mathematical processes), not factual knowledge such as what happened on December 7, 1941. The actual objects in the pictures themselves don't matter, only the abstract relations one can draw. Consider the question, "What do dogs and rabbits have in common?" A concrete answer might be, "Well, dogs help you hunt rabbits," while an abstract one would go, "Both are mammals." As Flynn notes in discussing this example in Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century (2012), IQ exams such as Raven's Progressive Matrices test for the abstract choice. He terms it a "habit of mind," a readiness to treat objects in a conditional, scientific way. "If you are unaccustomed to using logic for anything but to deal with the concrete world," he writes, "and indeed distrust reasoning that is not grounded in the concrete, you are not amenable to the change of gears that Raven's requires" (13). If a test question began, "Suppose two friends start from Point A and reach Point B five minutes apart ...," a hyperconcrete mind might think, "Why don't they drive the same speed?" while an abstract-habit mind would comfortably accept the opening as a working premise. Rising IQ scores, then, measure a particular kind of cognitive disposition that, in fact, primary and secondary education in the twentieth century had increasingly stressed. The gains are real, and they mean we are getting smarter — if, that is, we define intelligence as this capacity for abstraction.

Indeed, if we take the numbers at face value, we have to believe that American adults and children are much smarter than they were a half century ago, as if evolution accelerated so fast that it concentrated thousands of years of development into several dozen. The average child in 2010 would have been exceptional in 1950, the ordinary twenty-first-century adult able to run circles around a mid-twentieth-century adult whenever an abstract intellectual problem arose. That's what fifteen points represent — clear and distinct superiority, a marked gap in mental talent easy to demonstrate (hand both of them a Sudoku puzzle). A score of 117 puts someone in the top 15 percent of the population.

And yet, given this dramatic advance, those of us in the worlds of education and employment are stuck with a discordant fact. Why, we wonder, do so many high school students, college students, and younger workers seem so terribly deficient in basic knowledge and skills? Their reasoning abilities may have jumped forward, their ability to learn may make the 1950s mind appear lethargic, but their reading comprehension hasn't...