arbitrary rules.243 But proficiency with visuals is a sideshow to understanding the gains in intelligence that might be relevant to moral reasoning. Flynn identifies the newly rising ability as postscientific (as opposed to prescientific) thinking.244 Consider a typical question from the Similarities section of an IQ test: “What do dogs and rabbits have in common?” The answer, obvious to us, is that they are both mammals. But an American in 1900 would have been just as likely to say, “You use dogs to hunt rabbits.” The difference, Flynn notes, is that today we spontaneously classify the world with the categories of science, but not so long ago the “correct” answer would seem abstruse and irrelevant. “ ‘Who cares that they are both mammals?’ ” Flynn imagines the test-taker asking in 1900. “That is the least important thing about them from his point of view. What is important is orientation in space and time, what things are useful, and what things are under one’s control.”245
Flynn was putting words in the mouths of the dead, but that style of reasoning has been documented in studies of premodern peoples by psychologists such as Michael Cole and Alexander Luria. Luria transcribed interviews with Russian peasants in remote parts of the Soviet Union who were given similarities questions like the ones on IQ tests:Q: What do a fish and a crow have in common?
A: A fish—it lives in water. A crow flies. If the fish just lies on top of the water, the crow would peck at it. A crow can eat a fish but a fish can’t eat a crow.
Q: Could you use one word for them both [such as “animals”]?
A: If you call them “animals,” that wouldn’t be right. A fish isn’t an animal and a crow isn’t either.... A person can eat a fish but not a crow.
Luria’s informants also rejected a purely hypothetical mode of thinking—the stage of cognition that Jean Piaget called formal (as opposed to concrete) operations.
Q: All bears are white where there is always snow. In Novaya Zemlya there is always snow. What color are the bears there?
A: I have seen only black bears and I do not talk of what I have not seen.
Q: But what do my words imply?
A: If a person has not been there he cannot 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.246
Flynn remarks, “The peasants are entirely correct. They understand the difference between analytic and synthetic propositions: pure logic cannot tell us anything about facts; only experience can. But this will do them no good on current IQ tests.” That is because current IQ tests tap abstract, formal reasoning: the ability to detach oneself from parochial knowledge of one’s own little world and explore the implications of postulates in purely hypothetical worlds.
If Flynn is right that much of the Flynn Effect is caused by an increasing tendency to see the world through “scientific spectacles,” as he puts it, what are the exogenous causes of the availability of those spectacles? An obvious one is schooling. We know that schooling coaxes adolescents from Piaget’s stage of concrete operation to his stage of formal operations, and that even with schooling, not everyone makes the transition.247 Over the course of the 20th century, and all over the world, children came to spend more time in school. In 1900 an average American adult had seven years of schooling, and a quarter of them had less than four years.248 Only in the 1930s did high school become compulsory.
And during this transition, the nature of the schooling changed. Early in the century reading consisted of standing and reciting aloud from books. As the education researcher Richard Rothstein observed, “Many World War I recruits failed a basic written intelligence test partly because even if they had attended a few years of school and learned how to read aloud, they were being asked by the Army to understand and interpret what they had read, a skill that many of them had never learned.” 249 Another researcher, Jeremy Genovese, documented the changing goals of education in the 20th century by analyzing the content of the high school entrance exams in 1902–13 and comparing them to high-school proficiency tests given to students of the same age in the 1990s.250 As far as factual knowledge is concerned, less is expected of adolescents today. For example, in the geography section of today’s high-stakes