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| James R. Flynn |
Wall Street Journal
October 9, 2012
James R. Flynn, one of the most influential figures in modern psychology, isn't a psychologist. He is a trained political philosopher. He broke into psychology in his 50s by painstakingly documenting the now-famous "Flynn effect"—the strong tendency of nations' average measured intelligence ("IQ") to rise over time. "Are We Getting Smarter?" interweaves the author's expertise in psychology, political philosophy and sociology to shed light on a loosely related set of questions about human intelligence. At times the book feels like a collection of essays, but it forms one continuous argument.
When most people hear about the Flynn effect, they conclude that we really are getting smarter. Mr. Flynn is more cautious. He opens the book by reviewing his previous work on intelligence tests. IQs have risen, but we're definitely not smarter across the board. We're better with puzzles and similarities but not better at arithmetic. Vocabulary and general information have risen for adults but barely budged for children.
If you still want to say that people are "smarter" than they used be, Mr. Flynn doesn't object, but, he writes, "it would probably be better to say that we are more modern." Modern humans, he explains, see the world through what Flynn calls "scientific spectacles." We are comfortable with abstract classification, logic, and hypotheticals—including, Mr. Flynn suspects, moral hypotheticals. He amusingly recounts youthful arguments with his racist father: "[W]hen he endorsed discrimination, we [Mr. Flynn and his brother] would say, 'But what if your skin turned black?' As a man born in 1885, and firmly grounded in the concrete, he would reply, 'That is the dumbest thing you have ever said—whom do you know whose skin ever turned black?'"
Mr. Flynn then moves on to a grab-bag of IQ-related topics. Are less-developed countries experiencing a Flynn effect? Usually. IQ is rising very rapidly in Kenya and fairly rapidly in Saudi Arabia, but slowly in Sudan and Brazil. What does the Flynn effect imply for the death penalty? Courts call the execution of the mentally retarded "cruel and unusual," but how should we measure retardation? Mr. Flynn argues that a killer considered competent by the standards of 1960 could easily be categorized as mentally retarded by the standards of today.
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