By Larry Marsh, Kansas City Star Midwest Voices columnist 2009
If the SAT scores of our children are lower than ours were, how can we explain IQ scores rising at 3 points per decade? This Flynn Effect is well-known but not easily explained. Your kids may think they're smarter than you are. Are they right?
James R. Flynn, professor emeritus at University of Otago in New Zealand and the author who hypothesized the Flynn Effect, has argued that people's environmental circumstances have a substantial effect on their IQ scores. Throughout history people allocate their mental energy according to their priorities, as determined by their attitudes, which, in turn, reflect their circumstances. Both SAT scores and IQ scores ultimately may reflect our historical circumstances.
Consider the lower SAT scores. When I was in college in 1967 the average overall SAT score was 1,059. By 2008 the average had dropped to 1,017. When I was a kid, there were no hand calculators. In grad school I was glad to pay $250 for a calculator that was pretty much limited to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Why should kids today work hard to learn basic math when the answers are readily available at the click of a button? With today's information overload, why learn history when Wikipedia can easily retrieve even the most arcane historical facts?
Born during the Roosevelt administration, I didn't have the advantage of inter-library loan, much less the Internet, so I learned to hold on to every book and bit of information I could get. Today, why memorize some fact when you can always just "Google it"?
After retiring from 30 years of teaching, I took a job for a year at Adknowledge, Inc., an Internet advertising firm here in Kansas City where many people, including the CEO, were in their 20s. My desk was full of papers in contrast to the clean and clear desks of my younger colleagues.
Older folks like me may have gotten good SAT scores not because we were smart, but because our attitudes and priorities caused us to retain lots of facts useful on SAT tests but not so relevant for the IQ test.
What about the rising IQ scores? IQ scores are re-centered at 100 points every so often to reflect the average intelligence of the current generation, but Professor Flynn re-adjusted IQ scores to make them comparable across generations. If IQ scores are rising at 3 points a decade, this implies that people on average now do better at answering essentially the same questions than people from earlier generations did.
In August 2008 on xanga.com commentator "pnrj" projected IQ scores back in time along a linear path. The backward linear projection of the Flynn Effect implies that the average person in Albert Einstein's generation (born 1879) would have an IQ of 74 or "severely mentally retarded" in today's parlance. William Shakespeare's contemporaries (born 1564) with an average IQ of 28 would be about as intelligent as a smart dog, and so forth. Of course, this makes no sense.
How can circumstances that shape our attitudes and priorities explain this Flynn Effect? At blogs.psychologytoday.com Scott Barry Kaufman who specializes in studying intelligence and creativity provides this clue in recounting psychologist Alexander Luria's interview in the early 20th century with a peasant in a remote region of the Soviet Union:
IQ Test Examiner: All bears are white where there is always snow; in Novaya Zemiya there is always snow; what color are the bears there?
Soviet Union Peasant: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.
IQ Test Examiner: But what do my words imply?
Soviet Union Peasant: If a person has not been there he can not say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.
From the point of view of the Soviet peasant, it was a waste of time to allocate mental energy to thinking about an abstraction far from the reality of that peasant's circumstances. Historically most people never traveled far from where they were born. In earlier times people as individuals and society as a whole could not afford abstract thinking because they needed to focus on survival, which could not be taken for granted.
Until the second half of the 18th century most people were extremely poor. Their occupations and tribal villages were generally limited to those of their parents. Developing their minds by thinking about abstract concepts was just not in the cards. Aristotle and Galileo were exceptions who had powerful patrons who sponsored their survival and provided them with time to think.
For most people knowing their place in society and not challenging their assigned place in society was the safest path to follow. Even today there are those who resent someone who seems "too big for their britches" in talking too much about abstract concepts.
Although we cannot go back to measure the IQ scores of our ancestors, it is quite likely that average IQ scores rose only very gradually until the late 18th century until the industrial revolution began to liberate more and more people from the drudgery of the daily fight for survival.
Only with increasing real incomes were people able to increase their IQ's substantially. In other words, it has not been a linear progression. The rate of increase in IQs may not have been at the constant 3 points a decade rate claimed by the Flynn Effect, but may be increasing at an increasing rate. This means that the IQs back in the days of Shakespeare and Einstein may have been higher than the backwards linear projections provided by "pnrj" imply. It also means that future increases in IQ scores could well exceed the 3 points per decade rate as our grandsons and granddaughters get more involved in abstract thinking.
Flynn's rate versus true rate
The graph on the right compares the Flynn Effect represented by the straight line with the true effect represented by the curved line which starts out essentially flat and then curves dramatically upward.
The repetitive jobs of the past are being off-shored and off-loaded to automated, voice-activated semi- intelligent systems. In the future our children and grandchildren will need to think more intelligently and more creatively just to keep a decent job.
Are our children and grandchildren smarter than we are? They had better be or they are doomed.
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SAT average test score lowering
It is entirely possible that the average SAT score has dropped because more kids are taking it than ever before. The SAT is a voluntary test, which you have to pay for, that is only taken as a way to get into college. In previous generations, only the best and most qualified students considered college, so they were the only ones paying to take the SAT. Today, with more people than ever striving for college, more and lesser qualified academic students are taking the SAT. This lowers the average scores, because average is a function of everyone who takes the test. Since the best students were already taking the test in large numbers, the average is more impacted by the increasing number of middle to lower performer students taking the test.
This in no way says the best and the brightest aren't smarter than previous generations. This is simply a product of more students having the opportunity and motivation to take an optional test, because we as a society have placed greater value on getting into and attending college.