A Rising Tide?

Throughout the 20th century, worldwide IQ scores went up. I’m talking about a widespread phenomenon that was by no means universal, but the scores rose by 2 or 3 points per decade on average.

You’re thinking: if the average global IQ started at 100 in 1900, that means it would have been between 120 and 130 by the year 2000. That’s astute, but IQ tests actually redefine a score of 100 as average with every new generation, working the system around this number.

You might conclude that the world has gotten smarter, but that’s not exactly what political scientist James R Flynn concluded when he published his landmark paper on IQ scores in 1984. This paper lit the academic world ablaze, and soon enough, people started calling this systemic rise in IQ The Flynn Effect.

Flynn himself was uncomfortable with this notoriety, but the name has stuck.

He was also uncomfortable with the simplistic idea that the whole world just got smarter during the 20th century. Instead, he saw it as an entirely different way of thinking that the world had gradually adapted.

Flynn’s superpower was to compare old answers people had given to more modern answers—answers to both IQ test questions, and to simple, probing questions. In particular, Flynn had a treasure trove from Soviet psychologist Alexander Luria’s interviews in rural Uzbekistan in the early 20th century.

Luria asked his participants, What do a dog and a rabbit have in common?

One typical response might be that you use dogs to hunt rabbits. That’s because this knowledge was consistent with Russian peasants at the time. They had a first-hand and practical understanding that informed their daily life: you might be able to eat tonight if you go hunting with a dog.

By contrast, today’s response might be something like: both are mammals or both are animals. This is a totally different way of framing things.

What people during the 20th century learned how to do was to classify things in a more universal manner, using abstract thought to go beyond the realm of first-hand experience. Flynn wasn’t exactly dismissive of how important this was, but he did question whether or not this meant we were collectively smarter.

Instead, Flynn saw us as moving away from survival-based thinking to a much more hypothetical style. In other words, people could now do thought experiments much more readily.

Daydreaming about things that could not yet be, but might one day become a reality? That’s pretty important stuff. Throughout the 20th century, we saw the explosion of science fiction writing, where imaginations ran without inhibition, showing what could be possible with all this new technology. This is exactly the sort of hypothetical, abstract thinking Flynn described.

Flynn also saw that smarter didn’t necessarily mean wiser. Sure, people were capable of new types of thought, but if everyone was just becoming self-absorbed hedonists, what was the point of it all?

I think Flynn saw the same sort of trade-off I’m always ranting about.

Yes, we are now capable of doing so much more. Collectively, we can travel in space and communicate at the speed of light. But also: we no longer have travel routes committed to memory, nor do we bother to memorize phone numbers any more.

We don’t remember which of the hundreds of different plants we encounter each day might be poisonous, but we can follow a TV show like Severance.

Are we collectively smarter now than we were a hundred years ago? Few would argue that living today is generally better than living back then, simply thanks to life-saving technology and modern conveniences, so I’m not asking if you’d trade places with someone alive back then. Instead, I wonder what we would make of “intelligence” back then.

I have the suspicion that we’d be surprised at how smart some people are, and surprised at how dumb others are.

What do you think?