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Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ Scores In the Twenty-First Century
hessian sends this excerpt from The New Republic:
"[A] person who scored 100 a century ago would score 70 today; a person who tested as average a century ago would today be declared mentally retarded. This bizarre finding — christened the 'Flynn effect' by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve — has since snowballed so much supporting evidence that in 2007 Malcolm Gladwell declared in The New Yorker that 'the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact.' But researchers still cannot agree on why scores are going up. Are we are simply getting better at taking tests? Are the tests themselves a poor measure of intelligence? Or do rising IQ scores really mean we are getting smarter? In spite of his new book's title, Flynn does not suggest a simple yes or no to this last question. It turns out that the greatest gains have taken place in subtests that measure abstract reasoning and pattern recognition, while subtests that depend more on previous knowledge show the lowest score increases. This imbalance may not reflect an increase in general intelligence, Flynn argues, but a shift in particular habits of mind. The question is not, why are we getting smarter, but the much less catchy, why are we getting better at abstract reasoning and little else?"
I have to abstract myself away from shit like Jersey Shore, Real Housewives, Survivor, Jaywalking, etc. The things I hear pass for intelligent conversation now scare and enrage me. I for one do not believe American's at least are getting any smarter.
Silence is a state of mime.
Most IQ tests are in written form, so they can only be administered to children and adults old enough to read. So, only people who've been exposed to at least kindergarten plus (for a lot of people) preschool.
I am not a teacher, but I would venture to say that a whole buckload of evidence-based developmental psychology has gone into improving the educational system since 1912. Plus, things like school enrollment have gone way up. In 1912 a lot of rural kids -- and most people lived in the country -- went to one-room schoolhouses.
So I would think that IQ scores should go up in the competency areas schools have been trying to cultivate. And I would say, thinking about how different the education system probably is today, I'd be more surprised if nothing had changed.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
100 years ago your day included throwing on overalls and going farming. Everything was X, Y, Z, you could write it down, follow it and have it work. Even the early industrial movement showed thinking that followed X, Y, Z. As humanity has progressed and started to apply philosophical ideals to tasks we have developed systems where a job that was once X, Y, Z is now a complex equation of variable introduction. Fundamentally everything has seen this shift, from farming up to global commerce. So why have the IQ score gone up, well I would say it's probably because of the mental level of application required to grasp the basic ideas.
If you practice at something for years, you get better at it. I played video games for a lot of years and now I'm a puzzle-solving genius by 100 years ago standards. It's all because of video games.
Despite being exceptionally bright, I never scored higher than 125 on the IQ tests they made you take in high school. Some years later I decided to try to get a high IQ to qualify for Mensa. After studying for only a month, I scored 145 on math and 132 on English. Can anyone make themselves appear smarter? Yes, despite the fact that many claim we can't.
Disclaimer: I may have been stoned to the bejezus when taking some of those high school iq tests.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I don't know in the US, but in europe nearly no one uses them anymore, they're considered just like puzzles that you can find on a weekly magazine. And it's weird that they are developed by psychologists, who are not exactly the smartest people around. It would be more appropriate if they were developed by physics PhDs or similar.
Sorry this is uncited, but I remember reading about an IQ test that western researchers tried to give to residents of a rural African village sometime in the mid-to-late 20th century. Most of the villagers were illiterate, so the crux was developing a test that didn't involve reading or writing. One of the test items involved a bunch of abstract shapes that had been molded out of clay; the villagers were told to match the shapes that "went together." Most of them "failed" this part of the test, because the researchers' definition of "passing" would be to match up shapes that looked alike, whereas the villagers tried to interpret the shapes as real objects and group them functionally, e.g., they matched spherical objects that looked like fruit to long, thin objects that looked like knives.
Men supposedly have better spatial reasoning based on the tests of manipulating blocks or gears in space.
But this is a culturally relative test.
Give a female who cooks a blob of leftovers or dough and she can pick the correct container that will hold the container without waste or a lot of air space. Most men can't.
Give a female a pile of dishes and a dishwasher vs a male with the same dishes and dishwasher and the average female will more effectively load the dishwasher than the male.
These are both spatial reasoning puzzles which are more complex than those given on tests.
Females have spatial reasoning- most of them just didn't play with lego blocks.
The tests are biased to men. That's why men have "superior" spatial reasoning.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's important to understand that IQ test were not designed to measure a person's aptitude, but rather measure a person's whiteness.
There was a series on several years ago (BBC :: Connections) where James Burke was describing the town criers
from the 15/16/1700's. He said that they would enter a town, and sing/chant the news for a couple of hours (or some time
like that) then leave. After a single hearing, people had memorized the whole chant. Try that today - ain't happening.
But, I'm pretty sure those people would never grasp the concept of an iPad.
I remember when my son was in school, I questioned some of the questions on the test for racial bias; the school was not
happy about that at all. They're so institutionalized in their system, it's outside of their scope to see the problem.
I am not a teacher or psychologist, but I have to wonder if at least some of this can be attributed to the things we have to normally deal with on a day-to-day basis. Specifically, in how those "things" have changed over time. As an earlier poster pointed out, life was a whole lot simpler several decades ago. Technology was much simpler and therefore easier to understand. The average person interacted with fewer people, less technology, less variance in their daily routine. Now, in developed countries at least, people are forced to interact with complicated devices and many people who are not actually present (via phone, teleconference, email, whatever).
People used to be amazed by the telephone, back when it was first invented. Many thought the user was talking to the device, not through it. Understanding that the telephone enabled remote conversation is the type of abstract thinking I'm trying to get it here. Multiply this by the hundreds of devices we're surrounded by and it's no wonder that people think more abstractly than 100 years ago. People have to, in order to deal with all the technology.
In an era when access to facts is a click or a tap away, it becomes much more important to be able to know how to use those facts, than to have a mental storehouse of them. Because the scope of human knowledge is orders of magnitude more than any person can grasp, we are forced to rely on the opinions of others in all but our own narrow areas. If I read an article on, say, a potential cure for cancer, I know I lack the scientific knowledge to replicate the research or even build a good mental model of what's supposed to be happening, biologically, except on a very crude level. So to make judgment, I have to engage in pattern-matching, not fact-checking. Does this article contain the kinds of keywords, phrases, and tone that I've come to associate with woo-woo fringe theories, or does it seem in line with things I already know to be factual? Is it presented in a forum which has a reputation for rigor, or is it in a site featuring articles on aromatherapy and aura reading? Does it discuss limited results, provide caveats, and discuss risks, or does it promise instant and universal cures with no drawbacks and talk about how "they" are "terrified" of this discovery?
This applies in virtually every field of knowledge. We can't judge most things on the facts, because we can't know all the facts. We have to rely more and more on pattern matching and abstraction to reach conclusions. Most of us devote our "locally hosted fact storage" to that data pertinent to our daily lives, our jobs, and our favorite hobbies. A big chunk of what's left goes to meta-information about how to GET facts when we need them, and what's left is devoted to deciding if what someone is presenting as a "fact" is actually true, and to evaluating the value of each fact as it weighs in our opinions.
(It's a common mistake that if a person disagrees with you, it's because he doesn't know the FACTS! Odds are, he DOES know them, at least if he's anyone worth having a disagreement with. He just *weighs* them differently, because people apply facts as a means towards achieving their values and goals. Only in Jack Chick tracts and the like do people suddenly change their minds because a random stranger spews a series of "things you didn't know!" at them. Hell, even if you can prove beyond doubt that a particular justification for an opinion is objectively wrong, people will retain the opinion and look for new "facts" to support it. (Note how no matter how many times someone debunks a particular myth about Obama, or Creationism, or 9/11, or "free energy", or vaccines, the people who believe in conspiracies never change their beliefs -- they just find some new "proof". "OK, so the original study that linked vaccines to autism was proven to be a complete and utter fraud? So what, there's plenty more "proof", and besides, I don't believe it was a fraud, it was a frame up by the evil corporations!")
Why all the denial and knashing of teeth? Accept the Flynn effect as data, most likely the result of a vastly more technological society that requires more intelligence to run & live in. This even works for the one-third of intelligence that is attributable to environmental development. Human are nothing if not adaptable.
On the two-thirds genetic component of intelligence, it is likely that both women and men are selecting mates with an increased emphasis on intelligence, and decreased importance of other factors like health or strength. Nothing radical (3+sigma still won't get a date) just a central small shift.
In any case, the upside of intelligence has to pay for the downside (indecision, depression?autism?mental illness). Humans have always had this potential for increased intelligence, but before the upside never paid the downside. Now it increasingly does.
Mental retardation is an actual medical term which is subject to the Euphemism Treadmill effect, where over time a term becomes an insult in common usage and the professionals have to find a new word that doesn't have the baggage associated with it to maintain professional integrity (Similar to the reason we call them "Bathrooms" today instead of "Water Closets" or "Toilets" as the two latter terms became too crude through common usage). Don't blame "political correctness" on this, blame crass people like Anne Coulter who use the medical term in a derogatory sense towards those who don't have the disability without any sensitivity to those who must actually live with the condition.
Replace the word "Retard' with "AIDS carrier," "Cancer Survivor," or "Quadriplegic" and try making the argument that the offense people take to your use of these terms to disparage others is just "political correctness." The reason you don't use these terms as insults is because these are human beings who can fight back. "Retard" is okay because the mentally retarded can't defend themselves. Coulter is a bully and a coward for using the term and defending its use.
People like Coulter who call the backlash against their use of these words "political correctness" do so because the word "ignorant" applies to them. They are ignorant of the suffering of others, ignorant of medical science, and ignorant of basic good taste. I used the world "retard" as an insult when I was a child, but I'm an adult now and I am educated enough to know how abusing that word abuses those who are living with this debilitating condition.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Intelligence varies with at least 21 factors
Some of the other circumstances and attributes that have been found to vary to a greater or lesser (but always significant) extent in relation with IQ (Bouchard & Segal, 1985; Liungman, 1975) - note that not all of these relationships support an environmental view.
Intelligence varies with:
Infant malnutrition (-ve)
Birth weight
Birth order
Height
Number of siblings (-ve)
Number of years in school
Social group of parental home
Father's profession
Father's economic status
Degree of parental rigidity (-ve)
Parental ambition
Mother's education
Average TV viewing (-ve)
Average book-reading
Self-confidence according to attitude scale measurement
Age (negative relationship, applies only in adulthood)
Degree of authority in parental home (-ve)
Criminality (-ve)
Alcoholism (-ve)
Mental disease (-ve)
Emotional adaptation
"No single environmental factor seems to have a large influence on IQ. Variables widely believed to be important are usually weak....Even though many studies fail to find strong environmental effects....most of the factors studied do influence IQ in the direction predicted by the investigator....environmental effects are multifactorial and largely unrelated to each other."
- Bouchard & Segal (1985), p.452
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Iodine is critical for mental development in childhood and necessary for metabolism as an adult. It's also one of the nutrients that is hardest to get from a diet without variety (especially salt water fish) because it is leeched out from soil and run to the ocean. Iodized salt has meant that the average human being around the world is less iodine deprived and thus not as likely to have mental deficiencies from the deprivation.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.