We live in a time when access to knowledge and learning is at hand. We can always use our smartphones and computers through which we educate ourselves, but something does not turn out all the same. The experts realized that instead of noticing an increase in IQ globally, it appears to be falling.
During the 20th century, scientists noted that the IQ of humanity was increasing. Humans were becoming more intelligent. This rise in the average IQ score is known as the Flynn effect.
What is the Flynn effect?
The Flynn effect owes its name to James R. Flynn, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Otago in New Zealand. The Flynn effect corresponds to the substantial and lasting increase in the results of fluid and crystalline intelligence tests, measured in many regions of the world during the twentieth century.
The Flynn effect also addresses the issue of changing a population's IQ scores over time. For this purpose, James Flynn observed a rapid increase in intelligence quotient at a rate of about 3 points per decade during the twentieth century, but new research suggests that these years of intellectual flare-up have disappeared.
According to the experts, this impressive increase was due to better education, better nutrition and better health care.
Disturbing results
In a recent study, a team of researchers from the Norwegian Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research analyzed 230,000 IQ scores of men who joined the national military service between 1970 and 2009. The team found that for every generation, the score dropped by about 7 points on average.
This does not mean, however, that we are becoming stupid. But that did not stop many experts from finding the results of the Norwegian study incredibly unsettling for humanity.
To this end, Stuart Ritchie of Edinburgh University, who did not participate in the study, told the Tech Times: "This is the most convincing proof to date of a reversal of the Flynn effect. If you assume that their model is correct, the results are impressive and rather disturbing. "
Similarly, a study by Flynn himself on the IQ of British adolescents almost a decade ago revealed a similar drop in test scores.
"It looks like there is something vicious in British teenagers," Flynn told The Telegraph at the time.
"The cognitive environment of adolescents has not been enriched. Says Flynn.
Although this type of environmental attribution remains hypothetical, this possibility is supported by the latest research - which, it should be emphasized, comes from a single Norwegian sample (although particularly large).
Thus, in this new study, researchers observed decreases in IQ within real families, which means that the effect is probably not due to changing demographic factors, as some have suggested. But this suggests lifestyle changes behind this low IQ, perhaps because of the way children are educated, and activities they spend more time doing (games, apps, TV ...).
However, another possibility is to consider, which assumes that IQ tests are not suitable for accurately quantifying an estimate of the intelligence of modern people, thus favoring forms of reasoning formally taught that might be less valued in contemporary education and youth lifestyles.
"Intelligence researchers make the distinction between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence," research economist Ole Rogeberg, one of the authors of the study, told The Times.
"Crystallized intelligence is the ability to access information from long-term memory, and fluid intelligence is your ability to think logically and know how to solve problems in new situations. "
We are probably not at fault: these are the IQ tests.
But as long as scientists do not exploit part of their fluid intelligence to make a major breakthrough in what is really happening, we may never know it.
