Why IQs Rise

Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth

Are We Getting Smarter?: Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century
by James R. Flynn

Cambridge University Press, 310 pp., $22

IN THE MID-'80s, the political philosopher James Flynn noticed a remarkable but puzzling trend: for the past century, average IQ scores in every industrialized nation have been steadily rising. And not just a little: nearly three points every decade. Every several years, IQ tests test have to be "re-normed" so that the average remains 100. This means that 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?

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 28, 2012 2:57 AM
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