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What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect

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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.

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.

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?).

"What is Intelligence: Beyond the Flynn Effect", by James R. Flynn, Cambridge Univ. Press, UK/NY 2009. ISBN 978-0-521-74147-7, PB 300/219. Appendices I/II 16 pgs., Ref. 15 pgs., Subject Index 4 pgs., Name Index 4 pgs. There are 5 Figures & 5 Tables. 8 7/8" x 6".

Though a thoughtful and scholarly exposition, it is agilely written in so few places as to undermine its readability to more than laypersons. The book is, nevertheless, an important one in bringing attention to more recent hypotheses on how the mind/brain works, but is frightfully far from being written with "brevity and lack of pretension". Flynn provides 11 chapters, introducing "The Flynn Effect" in Chap. I, "A bombshell in a letter box" wherein Dutch psychologist P.A. Vroon in correspondence to Flynn wrote of the "enormous gains in a single generation on an IQ test" (Raven's Progressive Matrices), a phenomenon first convincingly documented by Reed Tuddenham studying mental test scores (US soldiers) in WW I and II. Flynn's studies showed significant IQ gains were true in nearly 30 nations, and posed paradox of whether today's children were brighter than their parents or IQ tests were poor measures of intelligence.

Flynn provides a thorough discussion of a variety of IQ tests, their components, and several explanations why IQ norms require periodic adjustments, rewriting of tests, and explanative for the observed 0.3-point rise in IQ annually. He discusses those intellectual qualities of wisdom and critical acumen not measured by IQ tests and elucidates on 10 SHAs (shorthand abstractions). The Appendix II describes a legal matter wherein identical twins with essentially identical IQ's and charged with murder were provisionally given different sentences, one a death sentence, based on obsolescence of a WAIS-III test administered to one twin.

In the final chapter, Flynn attempts to annihilate Howard Gardner who posited (1983) seven intelligences. This chapter, oddly enough, could/should stand alone: -- it is out of place in discussion of the "Flynn Effect", akin to having too much stuffing for the turkey, that pleasurable suffering we endure once a year.

Flynn, in this short book, attempts a very broad analysis to answer the question posed in the book's title. I found the book not always easy to follow, as he threaded his way through his meditations on intelligence. Certainly, the main aspect of this resolves into the measurement of the g-factor as a scientific measurement. All too frequently, discussions of intelligence get mired in the personalities of the investigators or the feebleness of the science as it has been so susceptible to cultural, racial and sexual prejudices. However, Flynn makes it clear that the measurements have some scientific merit, and tell us something substantial about human beings as animals. He builds his exploration around the "Flynn effect", i.e. the seemingly paradoxical aspect of the intelligence tests to have shown an approximate increase of 3 IQ points on average per decade. Although I did not find his book easy to understand in certain places, his discussion of the dimensions and measurement of intelligence opened a door on this field of psychology for me.

Though choppily written, this book provides an important update from one of the most influential psychometricians.

Charles Murray, with his strong belief in heredity, sits on the right side of the intelligence debate, and Flynn with his broader environmental views, sits on the left. Flynn had previously used his namesake effect to cast doubt on the field of intelligence. He has now amended his views, and uses The Flynn Effect to show that people are actually gaining real intelligence, year after year.

The Flynn Effect has documented massive increases in generational intelligence (0.3 IQ pts/yr), across all nations, over the past century. It is so profound that IQ scores must be adjusted for each year that passes since the test was last re-normed. Thus, a 102 on a 10-year-old test would be rescored to 99.

Flynn believes the effect is achieved by viewing today's world through "scientific spectacles". This includes the detachment of logic from hypotheticals and concrete referents. Previous generations had only pre-scientific, concrete referents, upon which to rely.

So, several generations ago, a test-taker may have noted that a squirrel and a moose were both items of food. Today he would use his scientific spectacles to classify both as mammals, a higher level answer.

One incredibly vexing problem with The Flynn Effect is the Mental Retardation Paradox. It boils down to the fact that the average 1900 IQ score would result in an IQ of 50-70 today, which is an absurd conclusion. Our grandparents were not retarded. And Einstein would not have to take remedial math.

Surprisingly, the book does not shy too far from touchy subjects. The author concedes that there is a white-black IQ gap of 17 points: 100-83. And black pre-school gains fall back to 0, as the children reach adulthood. He also believes that current immigration patterns may have a dysgenic effect, but that it is probably less than 1 IQ point per generation.

Flynn includes a list of concepts, or "shorthand abstractions", that he believes have increased humanity's critical acumen. They include such items as: Percent (Not discovered until 1860!!??); Natural selection (1864); Control group (1875); Random sample (1877); etc.

The book concludes with a statement carrying both optimistic and pessimistic implications: There's no reason to expect The Flynn Effect to continue indefinitely. After all, Scandinavian IQs appear to have stopped increasing. Maybe the undeveloped world, which is just now beginning to wear scientific spectacles, will begin to catch up.

What more can you want: The Flynn Effect explained by Professor Flynn himself?

Well actually, I would like it presented in a more direct and less intellectually challenging (pun intended) way. Chapter 6 ("IQ gains can kill") and Appendix II ("Declaration in a capital case") so clearly and straigtfowardly explain what "intelligence" means - and I believe the book will be much more readable if these are put at its very beginning. Briefly, these two sections state that a person's IQ is always defined by comparing him/her with his/her peers (p 231) and its validity is thus constrained; and IQ is not the be all and end all - read page 119: "At Berkeley in the fall of 1966, native-born Chinese entrants had an IQ threshold 7 points below whites. Despite this, they were as successful at university as whites". (Read the book to find out more on this.)

Fortunately, very early on Professor Flynn does describe the Flynn Effect (viz. if you do not normalize whatever IQ test your are using, i.e. if you are using an out-of-date test, peoples' scores just keep rising year by year). He also at the very beginning of the book outlines the "paradoxes" implied by this observation. I will name two of them:

1. Obviously people are not getting (that) "smarter", so how come they can score higher IQs when they do the same IQ tests that their ancestors did in the past?
2. Twin studies supposedly show strong (if not very strong) hereditary component in IQ. But the Flynn Effect suggests otherwise. Why?

A large part of the book is devoted to answering these paradoxes. I won't give away all the spoilers here - but you might have already guessed them. (e.g. a substantial portion of IQ tests assesses one's abstract and "scientific" thinking. Modern societies facilitate this type of thinking.)

The later chapters are quite different. They sound more philosophical and political. Flynn believes we should encourage what he calls "practical wisdom" and "critical acumen" (Chapter 7). Suffice to say his ideas are leaning towards the humanist/egalitarian school (not that there is anything wrong with it).

It is filled with jokes and humor (e.g. "a professor of sexology told me that however stupid human beings were in the past, they could still procreate because even animals can do that. I had to agree." (page 172) and these sugar coats balance the austerity of the topics the book otherwise covers.

I take this marvelous book to be an optimistic look at the progress of human mind based on careful analysis of evidence. With sharp wit and just enough humor (which made me laugh out loud on some pages), Flynn does what he promises at the beginning of the book: Give a lecture to the well-educated reader who is not necessarily an expert in psychology or IQ testing. I'm surprised to learn that there is a substantial rise in the IQ scores throughout the years and my first reaction was that there should be something fundamentally wrong IQ tests. Fortunately Flynn proposes arguments to solve the paradox and those arguments are really well-thought and well explained with very helpful analogies. His emphasis on how quickly our minds evolved to cope with the sudden rise in the complexity of society is in a sense optimistic for me because even though we know that the evolution of our brains proceed very slowly, we can rely on our thinking styles to progress much faster (not that I think evolution is a kind of progress towards an ultimate goal, it is just that I find it nice to see that our 'software' uses the underlying 'hardware' more and more efficiently and this is visible by looking at a mere 60-70 years of IQ testing).

To mention a few points I found Flynn's analysis of twin studies to dissect the paradox of IQ tests and the problem of environment versus genes very enlightening. His criticism of Gardner's multiple intelligences and short speculation of whether it is right to rank people according to some quantifiable metrics is also worthy of further discussion. On the other hand I'm a little bit reluctant about his explanation that the population owes the general rise of IQ to the widespread scientific thinking but at least he does not forget to mention that this kind of thinking and reasoning does not prevent people's quest for very problematic areas.

This book deserves to be an important reference for anybody who considers questions about measuring intelligence, evolution of mind and the subtle but long-standing effects of society and environment on the thought processes of individuals. The book should also be read to witness the complexity of the history human cognition if for nothing else.

I wish I had read this before I read the works of Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, and Levin. This is an outstanding book that everyone should read, not just those specifically interested in IQ.

This book addresses many more topics than the question in the title, namely, "What is Intelligence"? I found Ken Richardson's 2002 book "The Making of Intelligence" to be a more comprehensive, thoughtful, and focussed treatment of this question.