Are people stupid or are the tests outdated?
Are we getting stupid?
Alexey Paevsky, "Neuron News"
In 1984, the American psychologist James Flynn published in the journal Psychological Bulletin (respectively!) a work titled The mean IQ of Americans: Massive gains 1932 to 1978. That is, a significant increase in the intelligence of Americans over 46 years. Indeed, according to his data, it turned out that the average IQ of US residents gradually increased and increased by 15 points in almost half a century, which is a lot (recall that now the average IQ is about 100). The phenomenon has been called the "Flynn effect" – and has been confirmed by many studies in many countries.
However, recently, works have begun to appear that say: the pendulum has swung in the other direction, there is a "reverse Flynn effect": IQ is now either not growing or decreasing. A new article published in PNAS, and made on Norwegian material, says the same thing.
The authors from the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research, having processed a huge array of data – intelligence tests of 730 thousand Norwegian conscripts born in 1962-1991 (this is a very convenient sample, since all the "subjects" are the same number of years – 18-19), say: men born in 1969 are "smarter" than men born in 1962 by almost three points on the IQ scale (102.3 vs. 99.5), but then there is a decline: 99.4 for the year of birth in 1989 and then some plateau (so in the text, but on the graph from the article in PNAS, after a record decline, the curve did not reach a plateau, but began to rise again – VM).
At the same time, the effect is preserved for brothers from the same family.
So are we getting stupid? And why? The authors honestly write: "The analysis controls for all factors shared by siblings and finds no evidence for prominent causal hypotheses of the decline implicating genes and environmental factors that vary between, but not within, families." That is, and who knows why IQ is falling. There were no reasons among environmental factors.
Surprisingly, six months before the publication of this article, we discussed the effect of "lowering" IQ at a discussion on the results of 2017 in cognitive science, which was held at the Arhe center by the editor of the Schrodinger's Cat magazine Andrey Konstantinov (psychologist), one of the leading Russian cognitive scientists Maria Falikman and the editor-in-chief of our portal Alexey Paevsky, and came to the conclusion that, most likely, just the "ruler" that measures IQ is outdated. In a changed world, a person needs a slightly different intelligence, because we face other tasks and we have more tools at our disposal (including the Internet). Our intelligence is quite easily modified, and the tests remain the same.
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