Range - David Epstein Page 0,14
IQ tests given to young men in the Netherlands. The data were from a test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, designed to gauge the test taker’s ability to make sense of complexity. Each question of the test shows a set of abstract designs with one design missing. The test taker must try to fill in the missing design to complete a pattern. Raven’s was conceived to be the epitome of a “culturally reduced” test; performance should be unaffected by material learned in life, inside or outside of school. Should Martians alight on Earth, Raven’s should be the test capable of determining how bright they are. And yet Flynn could immediately see that young Dutchmen had made enormous gains from one generation to the next.
Flynn found more clues in test reference manuals. IQ tests are all standardized so that the average score is always 100 points. (They are graded based on a curve, with 100 in the middle.) Flynn noticed that the tests had to be restandardized from time to time to keep the average at 100, because test takers were giving more correct answers than they had in the past. In the twelve months after he received the Dutch letter, Flynn collected data from fourteen countries. Every single one showed huge gains for both children and adults. “Our advantage over our ancestors,” as he put it, is “from the cradle to the grave.”
Flynn had asked the right question. Score gains had occurred everywhere. Other academics had stumbled upon pieces of the same data earlier, but none had investigated whether it was part of a global pattern, even those who were having to tweak the test scoring system to keep the average at 100. “As an outsider,” Flynn told me, “things strike me as surprising that I think people trained in psychometrics just accepted.”
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The Flynn effect—the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century—has now been documented in more than thirty countries. The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.
When Flynn published his revelation in 1987, it hit the community of researchers who study cognitive ability like a firebomb. The American Psychological Association convened an entire meeting on the issue, and psychologists invested in the immutable nature of IQ test scores offered an array of explanations to usher the effect away, from more education and better nutrition—which presumably contributed—to test-taking experience, but none fit the unusual pattern of score improvements. On tests that gauged material picked up in school or with independent reading or study—general knowledge, arithmetic, vocabulary—scores hardly budged. Meanwhile, performance on more abstract tasks that are never formally taught, like the Raven’s matrices, or “similarities” tests, which require a description of how two things are alike, skyrocketed.
A young person today asked to give similarities between “dusk” and “dawn” might immediately realize that both connote times of day. But they would be far more likely than their grandmothers to produce a higher-level similarity: both separate day from night. A child today who scores average on similarities would be in the 94th percentile of her grandparents’ generation. When a group of Estonian researchers used national test scores to compare word understandings of schoolkids in the 1930s to those in 2006, they saw that improvement came very specifically on the most abstract words. The more abstract the word, the bigger the improvement. The kids barely bested their grandparents on words for directly observable objects or phenomena (“hen,” “eating,” “illness”), but they improved massively on imperceptible concepts (“law,” “pledge,” “citizen”).
The gains around the world on Raven’s Progressive Matrices—where change was least expected—were the biggest of all. “The huge Raven’s gains show that today’s children are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so,” Flynn concluded. They are more able to extract rules and patterns where none are given. Even in countries that have recently had a decrease in verbal and math IQ test scores, Raven’s scores went up. The cause, it seemed, was some ineffable thing in modern air. Not only that, but the mystery air additive somehow supercharged modern brains specifically for the most abstract tests. What manner of change, Flynn wondered, could be at once so large and yet so particular?
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Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, remote reaches of the Soviet