What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect (Hardcover)

~ James R. Flynn (Author)
Key Phrases: inspection time, digit span, obsolete norms, Chinese Americans, Reaction Time, Full Scale (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Flynn Effect refers to data the author studied indicating massive IQ gains in the developed world during the 20th century. Now Flynn speculates on the cause for these apparent gains. His answer centers on the replacement of concrete, experience-based thinking by abstract scientific thinking. Citing many scholarly works, Flynn paints a dynamic picture of what intelligence is and the role of a person's genetic background, physiology and neurology, immediate environment and broader social factors. He notes, for instance, that an individual's small genetic advantage can be multiplied greatly by environmental forces. An important chapter looks at a fatal consequence of IQ inflation: the use of outdated IQ tests and norms could lead to the execution of someone convicted of a capital crime who by today's standards is mentally disabled. Flynn's book is not always an easy read, given abstruse statistical analysis and some awkward writing (There is some evidence that members of Congress are less obtuse today at least in speeches designed for their peers). Despite these flaws, he has produced an impressively multidimensional and often wise look at the elusive topic of human intelligence. (Sept. 21)
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Review

"Flynn is a cautious and careful writer. Unlike many others in I.Q. debates, he resists grand philosophizing. His books ("What Is Intelligence?") consist of a series of plainly stated statistical observations, in support of deceptively modest conclusions, and the evidence in support of Flynn's original observation is now so overwhelming that the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact...average I.Q.s shift over time ought to create a "crisis of confidence," Flynn writes in "What Is Intelligence?", the latest attempt to puzzle through the implications of his discovery.The best way to understand why I.Q.s rise, Flynn argues, is to look at one of the most widely used I.Q. tests, the so-called WISC (for Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children)."
--Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker


"It is not just the fascinating effect that makes the book special. It's also Flynn's style. There's an unusual combination of clarity, wit, apposite allusion, and farsightedness in making connections and exploring unexpected consequences. The Flynn effect, in Flynn's hands, makes a good, gripping, puzzling, and not-quite-finished story..."
--Ian Deary, Edinburgh University


"This book is a gold mine of pointers to interesting work, much of which was new to me. All of us who wrestle with the extraordinarily difficult questions about intelligence that Flynn discusses are in his debt.."
--Charles Murray, American Enterprise Institute & co-author of The Bell Curve


"This highly engaging, and very readable, book takes forward the Dickens/Flynn model of intelligence in the form of asking yet more provocative questions. . . A most unusual book, one that holds the reader's attention and leaves behind concepts and ideas that force us to rethink all sorts of issues.."
--Sir Michael Rutter, Kings College London


"Flynn provides the first satisfying explanation of the massive rise in IQ test scores. He avoids both the absurd conclusion that our great grandparents were all mentally retarded and the equally unsatisfactory suggestion that the rise has just been in performance on IQ tests without any wider implications.."
--N. J. Mackintosh, University of Cambridge


"Citing many scholarly works, Flynn paints a dynamic picture of what intelligence is and the role of a person's genetic background, physiology and neurology, immediate environment and broader social factors...he has produced an impressively multidimensional and often wise look at the elusive topic of human intelligence."
--Publisher's Weekly


"Mainstream IQ researchers, who are used to being demonized when they are not being ignored, admire Flynn, who is politically a man of the left, for his fairness, geniality, insight, and devotion to advancing knowledge."
--Steve Sailor, vdare.com


"In What is Intelligence? James R. Flynn...suggests that we should not faciley equate IQ gains with intelligence gains. He says that it's necessary to 'dissect intelligence' into its component parts: 'solving mathematical problems, interpreteing the great works of literature, finding on the spot solutions, assimilating the scientific worldview, critical acumen and wisdom.' When this dissection is carried out, several paradoxes emerge, which Flynn in this engaging book attempts to reconcile."
--Richard Restak, American Scholar


"The 20th century saw the "Flynn Effect" - massive gains in IQ from one generation to another."
--Scientific American Mind


"In a brilliant interweaving of data and argument, Flynn calls into question fundamental assumptions about the nature of intelligence that have driven the field for the past century. There is something here for everyone to lose sleep over. His solution to the perplexing issues revolving around IQ gains over time will give the IQ Ayatollahs fits!."
--S. J. Ceci, Cornell University


"What Is Intelligence? is one of the best books I have read on intelligence-ever...This is a brilliant book because, first, it helps resolve paradoxes that, in the past, seemed not to lend themselves to any sensible solutions...one of the best things about the book is Flynn's sense of humility...this is a masterful book that will influence thinking about intelligence for many years to come. It is one of those few books for which one can truly say that it is must reading for anyone."
--Robert J. Sternberg, PsycCRITIQUES


"...In this thoughtful, well-written book, Flynn offers an account of why the so-called Flynn effect occurs and what it means (and does not mean)....This is the clearest, most engaging work on intelligence....All will learn from the author's nuanced arguments. Some may quibble with Flynn's observations, but their work is cut for them: one cannot fault his clarity or ingenuity. Essential.
--D.S. Dunn, Moravian College, CHOICE


"...James Flynn is best known for having discovered a stubborn fact...he established that in every country where consistent IQ tests have been given to large numbers of people over time, scores have been rising as far back as the records go, in some cases to the early 20th century. What Is Intelligence? is Flynn's attempt to explain this phenomenon, now known as the Flynn effect... an important take on what we have made of ourselves over the past few centuries and might yet make of ourselves in the future."
--Cosma Shalizi, Assistant Professor in the Statistics Department at Carnegie Mellon University and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, American Scientist

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 226 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (August 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521880076
• ISBN-13: 978-0521880077
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #145,509 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant update to Murray and Jensen's work., October 16, 2007

By	Gaetan Lion - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

I have read about this subject a lot and came across the "Flynn Effect" several times. This is the phenomenon that the general population IQ has steadily increased by about 3 IQ pts per decade. Detractors of IQ such as Stephen Murdoch IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea argue that the Flynn Effect proves IQ measurements are meaningless. IQ proponents such as Charles Murray Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) and Arthur Jensen The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Human Evolution, Behavior, and intelligence) vest little importance to the Flynn Effect. Yet, they have not managed to explain it away. I thought I'd study this strange phenomenon from the horse's mouth.

I was stunned. This book is brilliant. Flynn goes much beyond his predecessors in explaining what intelligence is and how it does change over time. The first thing Flynn did is disaggregate the IQ trends into their subcomponents. He observed that the improvement over time were very different depending on the domain. On arithmetic and vocabulary questions, IQs remained virtually flat for decades; Meanwhile, on `similarities' and `picture riddles' IQs went through the roof.

What's going on here? Flynn explains that our social context of everyday life has become more complex and scientific minded that have lead the population to think critically. In turn, this has contributed to higher scoring in similarities and complex picture riddles. As our society moved from an agricultural based one to an industrial one and ultimately information based one, our demand on critical thinking grew commensurately. The percentage of our labor force engaged in farming and factory work is declining while the one engaged in information based activities is growing rapidly. A half century ago a high school degree was a big deal. Now a college degree is often a prerequisite if not a graduate degree.

Flynn goes on capturing the dynamic interaction between the environment and cognitive capabilities over time. Flynn's "individual multiplier" stipulates that an individual influences the environment he operates in because the environment will respond to where the individual excels. Flynn's "social multiplier" describes the escalation of cognitive demands as we progressed from an agricultural to an information based society. The social multiplier is a giant mass wide positive feedback loop. Everyone's expectation of academic and professional achievement has risen over time.

Thus, Flynn concludes we have become far better at solving abstract problems because that is what society currently demands us to do. In his mind, this does not necessarily mean we are so much smarter than our ancestors (the physiological processing capability of our brains has not changed). It just means we have a different focus (abstract and post-scientific vs concrete and pre-scientific).

For Flynn, IQ can change over time depending of the choice you make. You decide to go on to college or grad school. You marry a smart one or a not so smart one. You decide to go in an intellectually intense profession or not. These decisions will affect your cognitive capabilities. That contrasts with Murray and Jensen who thought that IQ was pretty much fixed by the mid to late teens. The two positions are probably not so far apart. Cognitive capabilities can improve depending on favorable activities and exposure as Flynn suggests. But, those improvements are probably capped within a certain range as Murray and Jensen would indicate.

Flynn does not annihilate the foundations established by Murray, Jensen, and others. And, he certainly disagrees with Stephen Murdoch that IQ is meaningless. But, Flynn adds that you have to look at the dynamic time dimension associated with change in the social context (social multiplier) that have a strong impact on IQ. Let's face it, time affects everything. You can't compare GDP per capita, home prices, sports world records without putting them into an historical context. Flynn demonstrated the same is true for IQ.

In addition to this dynamic time dimension, Flynn strongly disagrees with Jensen's near obsessive attempt to establish a correlation between fast reaction time and IQ. Flynn states that depending on what reaction time measure you focus on, it can have either a positive or a negative or zero correlation with IQ. Despite these disagreements, Flynn pays much respect to Jensen's achievements including his G factor that captures a huge amount of information at any one static point in time.

Flynn adds that his field is much too focus on IQ. And, he invites his peers to come up with other measures that would capture critical acumen and wisdom. He has developed some rudimentary tests to measure those, but he acknowledges they need more work.

All the mentioned books are interesting and do contribute to fully understand how Flynn's book is revolutionary. Indeed, his theories are as much a leap as from Newton's law of gravity to Einstein's theory of relativity. It offers a totally different multi-dimensional intelligence framework.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most important books about IQ, October 8, 2007

By	Peter McCluskey (Mountain View, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book may not be the final word on the Flynn Effect, but it makes enough progress in that direction that it is no longer reasonable to describe the Flynn Effect as a mystery. I'm surprised at how much Flynn has changed since the last essay of his I've read (a somewhat underwhelming chapter in The Rising Curve (edited by Ulric Neisser)).
Flynn presents evidence of very divergent trends in subsets of IQ tests, and describes a good hypothesis about how that divergence might be explained by increasing cultural pressure for abstract, scientific thought that could create increasing effort to develop certain kinds of cognitive skills that were less important in prior societies.
This helps explain the puzzle of why the Flynn Effect doesn't imply that 19th century society consisted primarily of retarded people - there has been relatively little change in how people handle concrete problems that constituted the main challenges to average people then. He presents an interesting example of how to observe cognitive differences between modern U.S. society and societies that are very isolated, showing big differences in how they handle some abstract questions.
He also explains why we see very different results for IQ differences over time from what we see when using tests such as twin studies to observe the IQ effects of changes in environment on IQ: the twin studies test unimportant things such as different parenting styles, but don't test major cultural changes that distinguish the 19th century from today.
None of this suggests that the concept of g is unimportant or refers to something unreal, but a strong focus on g has helped blind some people to the ideas that are needed to understand the Flynn Effect.
Flynn also reports that the rise in IQs is, at least by some measures, fairly uniform across the entire range of IQs (contrary to The Bell Curve's report that it appeared to affect mainly the low end of the IQ spectrum). This weakens one of the obvious criticisms of David Friedman's conjecture that modern obstetrics caused the Flynn Effect by reducing the birth related obstacles to large skulls (although if that were the main cause of the Flynn Effect, I'd expect the IQ increase to be largest at the high end of the IQ spectrum).
It also weakens the inference I drew from Robert Fogel's book on escape from hunger. Flynn does little to directly address Fogel's argument that the benefits of improved nutrition show up with longer delays than most people realize, but he does report some evidence that the Flynn Effect continues even when the height increases that Fogel relies on to measure the benefits of nutrition stop.
Flynn reports that the Flynn Effect has probably stopped in Scandinavia but hasn't shown signs of stopping in the U.S. His comments on the future of the IQ gains are unimpressive.
There are a few disappointing parts of the book near the end where he wanders into political issues where he has relatively little expertise, and his relatively ordinary opinions are no better than a typical academic discussion of politics. In spite of that, the book is fairly short and can be read quickly.
One interesting experiment that Flynn discusses tested whether students preferred one dollar now or two dollars next week. The results were twice as useful in predicting their grades as IQ tests. Flynn infers that this is a test of self control. I presume that is part of what it tests, but I wonder whether it also tests whether the students were able to realize that the testers' word could be trusted (due to better ability to analyze the relevant incentives? or due to a general willingness to trust strangers because of how the ways they met people selected for trustworthy people?).

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A mixed bag, November 18, 2007

By	Bruce Gregory (Deep River, Connecticut) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I find this book hard to characterize. If you are an IQ maven, it is an essential read. On the other hand, much of the book deals with issues the author obviously feels strongly about, but issues that do not cast much light on the nature of IQ. The Flynn effect is the secular increase in IQ scores in developed countries over the past 50 years and possibly longer. It is well documented but not well understood. Flynn offers an explanation for the effect that I do not find particularly convincing. He maintains that over the past 50-100 years we have been increasingly viewing the world through "scientific spectacles" and this changing perspective explains why the gains in IQ are confined to certain subtests. (The subtests that show the most improvement involve the ability to discover rules that apply to patterns that the subject has never encountered before. Subtests devoted to vocabulary and arithmetic skills show virtually no change.) I have been associated with science education for over twenty years and have seen no data that support Flynn's optimism with regard to growing understanding of the scientific approach to problems.

The case can be made that over the past century we have encountered an increasingly complex visual world with the advent of new technologies (movies, TV, computer-based games) and these complexities have required the development of "higher-order" pattern discovery. (I am troubled by the uniformity in the rate of increases in IQ score, because it seems implausible that the visual environment has been growing more complex at a constant rate.) What the data seem to show is we are experiencing a secular increase in our ability to formulate rules that apply to both visual and verbal patterns. The most logical "culprit" driving this growth is the increasingly more complex environment. (On a more personal note, the author has caused me to rethink my view of Raven's Progressive Matrices. The tests are normally described as being based on visual pattern recognition and hence "culture free". It now seems to me that the tasks rely on the ability to formulate and test rules based on visual input. This skill seems to me to go well beyond what we normally call pattern recognition.)

The author makes a strong case for adjusting IQ scores for the amount of time that has elapsed since they were normed, but this is primarily of concern for activities that are based excessively on IQ scores. (Unfortunately such activities are prevalent in the United States and include "qualifying" convicted criminals for the death penalty and qualifying children for special instructional help.)

The author succeeds admirably in making the case that we know much less about intelligence that some experts claim we do. He also presents a wealth of data not normally covered in discussions of intelligence. These accomplishments alone make the book worth reading.