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What Is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect 1st Edition

4.0 out of 5 stars 24 customer reviews
ISBN-13: 978-0521880077
ISBN-10: 1848162235
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 274 pages
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (August 27, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1848162235
  • ISBN-13: 978-0521880077
  • ASIN: 0521880076
  • Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.6 x 9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #967,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Format: Hardcover 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.
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Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
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.
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Format: Hardcover
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.
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