The Flynn effect is the phenomenon by which performance on IQ tests in many countries has increased over the last 100 years or so. A recent meta-analysis by scholars Jakob Pietschnig and Martin Voracek found full-scale test performance has been increasing by the equivalent of 0.28 IQ points a year, or 28 points over the last 100 years.
In my previous post, I argued that gains in brain size alone might explain about 5 of these points.
How do we explain the remaining 23 points?
It’s well known that schooling increases IQ scores (though probably not intelligence) by about 2 IQ points per year. Given that people today get about four more years of schooling than they did 100 years ago, this explains another 8 points of the Flynn effect.
How do we explain the remaining 15 points?
A study by scholar Michel Duyme et al (hat-tip to commenter “Swank”) showed that kids adopted into high socioeconomic homes score 13 IQ points higher than kids adopted into low socioeconomic homes. Well, people who lived 100 years ago, with 8th grade educated parents in rural settings without electricity, indoor plumbing, television and internet access, were raised with far fewer socioeconomic advantages than people today, so we can expect that to shave off another 13 points (independent of the schooling effect).
Some might object that socioeconomic effects on IQ fade by adulthood, but that’s misleading. Because socioeconomic effects are not, in my opinion, related to real intelligence, they do not strongly predict the adult socioeconomic environment which one must partly achieve using one’s true ability. In other words, it’s not that socioeconomic environments stops affecting IQ, but rather that real intelligence starts affecting socioeconomic environment, causing socioeconomic environment to just become a redundant multiplier of real ability, creating the spurious impression that it has no effect.
However, when comparing people raised in different generations, the independent effect of socioeconomic factors don’t fade in adulthood, because they reflect differences in society that the individual has little control over. What I am describing here is very similar to a model of the Flynn effect proposed by scholars James Flynn and William Dickens.
This leaves only 2 points of the Flynn effect unexplained. I believe these remaining 2 points can be easily explained by what I call the Kaufman effect. Years ago I noticed that new versions of IQ tests such as the Wechsler give a lot more coaching than older versions. I began to wonder if this might cause people who take old IQ tests (after receiving extensive coaching on new ones) to score much higher than the old norm group on the old test (who did not have the benefit of this coaching) thus causing psychologists to overestimate how well new cohorts perform on tests compared to old cohorts. I wasn’t the only one who thought of this, as apparently scholar Alan Kaufman wrote a paper on the topic.
So to sum up, I tentatively conclude that 5 points (per century) of the Flynn effect can be explained by rising brain size caused by nutrition, 8 points can be explained by more schooling, 13 points can be explained by socioeconomic advances, and 2 points are spurious (Kaufman effect):
Pumpkin Person 
Life expectancy in the USA, 1900-98
1900 men 46.3 woman 48.3
1998 men 73.8 woman 79.5
http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-statistics/life-expectancy/
http://demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html
“A study by scholar Michel Duyme et al (hat-tip to commenter “Swank”) showed that kids adopted into high socioeconomic homes score 13 IQ points higher than kids adopted into low socioeconomic homes.”
Low status means I could have been 123 if adopted into high status. Maybe I would not be on SSDI as I am now. My dad hit me before I was 2 and when I was in school my mom never talked to me about how well I was doing. She went back to him when I was 5 and left 6 months latter. He was in the military before I was born. He would smoke allot because I remember the smell of his trailer. My mom told me she had to hide the food stamps because he would sell them for marijuana. My brother smoke tons of marijuana but I don’t. He has rage issues.
I remember being in “advanced classes” but I did not understand what they were going on about. When I fraught with my brother she would call the police or have some tall guy (6’8″) spank us. The police woman called social services on my mom when I was 14 and he was 13 so we went into foster care. The Latino lady could not understand the jokes from the comic books I read (the far side). That was when I made my model of a nanotube fractal from chicken wire they had. The only reason I did not quite school was because of going into foster care. I was skipping school for a month before I had the fight with my brother.
Bible camp was fun even though I was scared about hell all the time. My mom took us there every year. I listen to the first five books of the left behind books on tape when 12. I also saw all dogs go to heaven when I was six and my dad told me crying was for babies. My uncle hit my mom when I was 8 and we hid under the bed when he was yelling that was when we went into the desert and was picked up by a Mexican who took us to the hospital. Soon after my grandmother went to a retirement home and my mom left the farm and I started government school.
Chronic stress for my whole life.
It is a good thing child labor laws were set in place. People who were against it were also against Lyndon B. Johnson. Watergate also had something to do with John F. Kennedy. The cold war Eisenhower talked about in his speech was something Nixon new about. John Edgar Hoover was defeated by Roosevelt in 1932 but as director of the FBI he had to deal with the mob because of the 21st amendment. Too bad spent so much time on Martin Luther King Jr. He was a communist sympathizer apparently and friends with Kennedy. The Joseph McCarthy trials really had an affect on society. Even Howard Hughes was accused of scamming the government.
2001 a space odyssey was a great movie. They used Arthur C. Clark to fake some moon footage in case the astronauts died so that the public would not experience what they did with Kennedy’s death. But we did land on the moon so it was unnecessary but still causes people to question what we did in 1969. The Xbox One has the same computational capacity as HAL 9000.
That guy who was 171 asked me if I had eidetic memory. I told him no because I have aphantasia. I do not see, smell, hear touch, or taste my memories. The are all semantic memories even the episodic ones. And I do not see math in my head. Geometry / spacial awareness all happens in my parietal lobes disconnected from my temporal lobes. The temporal lobes are where geometry is translated into color vision. Mine is broken. I know what the shape is but I cannot see it. If this was not a problem I could use the method of Loci.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
My brain must be functionally different than most people.
Walt Disney made great films about outer space. (definitely did not have what I have) I love animated movies. Like Atlantis the lost empire. They see what they draw before they draw it.
My plastic is fine, it is very fast, maybe my white matter was damaged by (apostrophe) in some way. I will find out on Monday but I wish I could have a spect scan done on me. MRI is not a functional scan.
My mother likes Gilligan’s Island and the Beverly Hillbillies. They got rich from oil and Thurston Howell, III almost jumped off a building during the crash of 1929. He was a millionaire. I read the great Gatsby in 11th grad. He got his money from a man who he meet after the Great War. (WW1). I published a book I made as a school project in 2005 about The Wizard of Oz in 2014. No one seems to be buying it on Amazon. The book was about how the 1906 earthquake in Francisco bankrupted the European banks. The gold standard was the yellow brick road and the ruby slippers were the silver standard. The people in charge of Shirley Temple wanted to much money for her to star as Dorthy.
Actually my book was about candy but the original book was about 1906.
It seems you’ve had a chaotic life. My life is very boring in comparison, which is probably why I spend so much time reading blogs on the Internet.
I’m interested in seeing PP’s analysis of you. I think an analysis of your scores would contribute strongly to the body of IQ research.
Yes, I did say I would analyze him. I will do a brief preliminary analysis in my next post.
they do not strongly predict the adult socioeconomic environment which one must partly achieve using one’s true ability.
that’s way more true in canada than it is in the us, the uk, france, italy, spain, let alone developing countries.
in those countries the class you come from is the single best predictor of the class you end up in. it’s much better than IQ for example.
in fact,
canada has the softest class structure in the world. one might say, “no. that’s denmark.” but denmark is a tiny county. canada is huge. and some parts of canada are a lot richer than other parts. peepee lives in canada’s richest city, iirc.
peepee can believe in meritocracy BECAUSE she is a canuckistani. meritocracy may be her “lived experience”.
if so she should always sing O Canada with gusto.
The whole concept of social class seems kind of meaningless in Canada.
but this phenomenon will hoist peepee by her own retard if she thinks hard enough.
given:
1. meritocracy, and…
2. genetic determinism, it follow that…
3. a society which has been meritocratic long enough will develop a very rigid class structure…rich people marry rich people.
there must be a lot of downward mobility in canada too, unless rich canadians have no children.
social mobility must go both ways. for every person who moves up, someone must move down.
so the income quantiles in canada must be much more poorly correlated with their corresponding IQ quantiles…if IQ is “genetic”.
and this would be expected in canada as in scandinavia, precisely because the education system doesn’t use tests.
that is, rich canadians are comparatively dumb and have dumb kids who spend their parents money on frivolous crap like trips to barbados and bar tabs and sink. 😉
I do think IQ is less correlated with money in Canada than in the U.S., but I don’t think it’s primarily because Canada’s universities don’t use tests.
I think it’s because smart Canadians are less motivated to spend long hours making money because:
1) Canada takes good care of her poor
2) Rich Canadians pay more taxes compared to their U.S. counterparts
3) Money buys less power in Canada than it does in the U.S. because it’s a less corrupt country
4) Canada is less obsessed with social class
it’s not as if tests count for that much in the US. otherwise i’d likely be arguing for the system and working at goldman sachs. but they do count for a lot in…i’d guess…90% of the developed world and in many developing countries like china and india.
another factor is RACE. canada’s biggest minority group is still pretty small, and if i’m not mistaken it’s “asians” including indians. of course, canada has a much bigger % of its population as native american, and i get the impression that they are still pretty miserable.
i read yesterday that the average student debt of a canadian is $28,000 CAD. that’s about the same as the US, except in CADs. i was surprised.
the difference between canada’s most prestigious university (i’m guessing McGill, U Toronto, UBC, idk about the french ones) and its worst university is a lot smaller than the difference in the US, UK, france. i don’t know about other countries except for germany, where it’s the same as in canada. i think it’s the same in the antipodes, but i’m not sure.
so when you look at us presidents or UK PMs or french presidents you see the same schools over and over.
Yes Canada’s Native Americans are quite poor. Pretty much the only place I see them are among the homeless sadly. Alcohol seems to have devastated this community. They might be a good example of reaction norms considering they’re Mongoloid and should in theory be smart per Rushton, and they independently created great civilizations despite being a lot more geographically isolated from other cultures than sub-Saharan Africa.
On the other hand, their geographic isolation provides a genetic explanation for their low current achievements and low IQ:
http://search.proquest.com/openview/cd9d6af4b206417b91b9b9c1a75ce983/1?pq-origsite=gscholar
of course there are two perspectives within the capitalist world. the true one and the one of “false consciousness”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness
the proletarian perspective equates wealth and status with earned income…with being a really, really good employee.
the bourgeois and feudal perspective equates wealth with wealth, irrespective of the income it generates currently, and irrespective of whether it is earned.
the NYLSY found that wealth was even less correlated with IQ than income, and that high IQ people were just as likely to get into financial straits as anyone.
a family fortune can be ruined by one spendthrift.
so one might think that those families whose fortunes have survived long enough must be “true breeders” but not for high IQ. there are no such american families or only a couple…the astors might be one.
yet in the case of the british aristocracy the difference between rich dukes and poor dukes may only be where their land was…and nothing to do with the virtues of the family over the generations.
but america is “nouveau”.
my own family name which still has some very rich scions…i am not one of them obviously…
comes from a publishing business founded in the very late 18th century only a few years after astor immigrated to america.
family fortunes from before the astors in the us…i would guess they don’t exist.
i mean, are the boston cabots descended from john cabot?…who was actually an italian?
and this really is a thing.
there are some people who are great at making money, but horrible at keeping it…
and vice versa.
but obviously….
if you’ve made enough, you can be a spendthrift without any effect,
but if your children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are spendthrifts…
it’s back with the hoi polloi.
I think the financial variable that correlates most with IQ is lifetime earnings, and at high levels, self-made wealth is probably a better indicator of it than a single year’s salary or taxable income which is kind of meaningless for people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. But at low levels, net worth is pretty meaningless because it may only reflect college debt or spending habits. At high levels, spending is kind of meaningless. No one was ever kept off the Forbes 400 because they spent too much money, with the possible exception of Michael Jackson who accumulated hundreds of millions in debt from spending money on himself with huge interest rates.
… real intelligence starts affecting socioeconomic environment, causing socioeconomic environment to just become a redundant multiplier of real ability, creating the spurious impression that it has no effect…
this is the so-called Flynn-Dickinson model for explaining the Flynn effect. you knew that right?
I mention them a few lines later.
oh that was the next paragraph.
emily dickinson wasn’t a psychologist fucktard. she died before flynn was born.
i wasn’t thinking of emily dickinson. but “dickens” and “dickinson” are pretty close.
tards gonna tard.
the take away for peepee,
if P = G + E is roughly true, then…
a random sample from a population which is a collection of populations for which:
1. the expectation of P is roughly the same, and
2. for which h^2 is roughly the same,
will give the same h^2 as its sub-populations.
the test of P = G + E awaits.
I agree.
And I’m not especially invested in the idea of a high heritability
I am invested in the idea that real intelligence is biological, but that doesn’t have to mean genetic
I actually think ironically HBD is kind of meaningless if intelligence is strongly determined by independent genetic effects because it means group differences can be washed away by a few generations of eugenics
They might as well be environmental differences if they can be eliminated that easily.
But if meaningful heritability is low, and if group differences are also independently genetic, then that implies they are ancient, enduring and meaningful
and peepee is a booster for the block design subtest, but i don’t get it.
from my understanding all one need do is mentally impose a tic-tac-toe “board” on the design.
everyone should score 19, that’s the ceiling right?
if my understanding is correct, it’s a super shitty test.
For 95% of people who take the test, it’s a novel task and so no one has time to apply any strategies unless they think them up on the spot which itself takes high intelligence. As a result the test has a potent g loading of 0.7, higher than any other performance test on the original Wechsler scales.
But the Archilles’ heel (or as you would say, Archilles’s heel) of any novel problem solving task is as soon as you’ve seen it, it’s no longer novel and becomes a super shitty test because you can think up strategies in retrospect.
That’s why college admission tests, which people have great incentive to prepare and study for, can never use novel problem solving.
Archilles?
Good catch, no R. My Achilles’ heel is spelling. 🙂
Sadly, I only scored 10 on Block Design (and on Digit Span).
It was the first test I did when I took the WAIS-IV and I was super nervous. My tester handed me the blocks without even telling me what I was to do with them!
Supposedly it’s the best measure of potential engineering ability (???)
Although I think it’s a big mistake to over-interpret sub-test scores.
Even though I think block design, digit span, and simple reaction time are the least culturally biased tests, that doesn’t mean they’re not biased in other ways.
You have a brain that is extremely good at acquiring knowledge and language. This is perhaps the most human ability of all, but it’s one that is extremely hard to measure in a culturally reduced test because very little general knowledge is culturally universal.
But among people who share the same culture, verbal tests are generally the best measures of intelligence.
Hey chartreuse,
Have you ever read “Bobos in Paradise” by David Brooks? Very interesting stuff!
i’ve read The Social Animal…and i agree with most of it.
brooks makes his living as a token conservative…an edmund burke type of conservative…
otherwise known as a fabian.
Never understood how he’s been allowed to call himself a conservative…
Just brought it up because I re-read it recently…
Hey PP,
It’s interesting that reaction times have gotten slower even though overall IQ has gone up.
Do you think it’s possible to improve reaction times with video games?
I was doing the Human Benchmark (http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime) yesterday, and received an average time of 249 ms after 40 tries. Satisfied with my performance, I asked my older bro to try, and he received an average of 222 ms! (after I think about 25 tries)
What gives? I’m sure I’m way smarter than him, because I did way better on the SAT. My bro plays video games, whereas I haven’t touched them in years, so could that have anything to do with it?
Kinda bothers me…
Research shows complex reaction time can be improved with practice but simple reaction time can not, beyond about 10 attempts, but I don’t buy that because I knew a guy who practiced chronometrics all the time and his simple RT definitely improved over time.
Complex reaction time can definitely be improved through practice, and I believe it has been speeding up in recent decades. As I mentioned on my other blog, a brilliant Promethean even felt this might (help) explain the Flynn effect and that it’s a genuine increase in intelligence:
https://brainsize.wordpress.com/2014/08/26/radical-theory-for-explaining-the-flynn-effect/
It is strange that simple RT has slowed even though IQ scores and even brain size has gone up. One published theory is that genetic g has declined, but environmental factors have propped up IQ.
Other theories I’ve been considering are that superior height has been slowing reaction time because the impulse has further to travel, and weight gains have been slowing movement time. I also wonder if maybe something in our modern environment is slowing reaction time. Just as changes in nutrition have increased brain size, perhaps some neurotoxin in the modern World is slowing simple RT.
Perhaps whatever variable (genetic or non-genetic) is causing the autism rate to go up (if it has gone up independent of diagnostic changes and increased awareness) is also causing reaction time to slow.
Socioeconomic advances and brain size are not easily separable.
Socioeconomic advances can affect brain size in infants and fetuses, but in five-year-olds, perhaps not so much, and yet the study I cited showed SES having a big impact on the IQs of kids adopted around age five suggesting brain size was not involved in the large gains.
Why would brain size be the only biological variable? Are you implying that 100% of genetic intelligence is explained by brain size?
Many biological variables cause intelligence, but the only one proven to have increased over the 20th century is brain size. It’s likely other biological brain properties increased too, but we don’t have direct evidence
Parents of high economic status induce in their kids what wiki calls:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reference_effect
This is a definite boundary layer for understanding language and emotional focus. Emotional investment into children determines the stability they have when being aware of external and internal boundaries. I always identified with cartoon characters and book characters. To me I was them and felt for them. But it seems that in school most of the stuff I cared about no one would involve themselves with me. At age 8 I had the idea that a space voyage would require artificial wombs in robots because of the toy set I had where I built a space ship with the robots in chairs. I wrote a letter to some radio show about it and my mom mailed the letter. I also has an aquarium where a diver and a treasure chest and a share and gold coins were suspended in a transparent gel. I wanted to make a stop motion film of it. I new what stop motion animation was at 8. I saw clay animation on TV at age 5. I had a toy key chain laser gun at age six. That was the first time I realized what technology was.
I think that emotional investment is what causes you to remember things. The people on TV had problems and I could not help them. I remember drawing a book about little foot in the land before time movie at age 7 and fievel goes west. I remember the gold Christmas miniature tree I got for my seventh birthday. And I remember at age 8 I wanted to win the prize money from the cereal box to fund an animal shelter. Me and my sister put gold jewelry on a box where we lost some in the mud.
Emotional control allows the inhibition of narrow focus. Parallel focus induces gamma waves as meditative absorption of stimulus. My mind contains the body the way a computer monitor contains rapidly previewed pictures(jpeg). Paralleled abstractions i.e. fifth dimensional self enclosed branches.
http://www.mind-development.eu/stages-development.html#intro
Postformal thought takes advantage of the individual’s full spectrum of knowledge, covering all the domains in which he has acquired knowledge, especially expert knowledge. He can synthesize new solutions drawing upon domain-general rather than domain-specific expertise – and predict interaction between the domains – within the boundaries of his knowledge network, which as an Open System may be expanded and revised, and incorporate the research and conclusions of others as an (almost unlimited) extelligent resource. Developing the Knowledge Net is most important, if a student wishes to enhance his Postformal level of operations.
Once a person has reached the level of Postformal Operations, there is an integration of Emotion and Cognition. Postformal operations include the evaluation of the contextual relevance of emotional information when decision making. Along with the increase in Metacognitive Intelligence that accompanies Postformal operations, there is an increased ability for Introspection. Most people have some capacity for introspection, to look inward and reflect on one’s self and one’s own thoughts, but this capacity increases dramatically when a student attains the stages of Formal and Postformal Operations.
Unresolved personality issues can certainly have a profound effect on IQ. Lester Gelb tells the story of a young boy who had been the victim of poor teachers and exploitive foster homes, and as a result he was depressed and ‘unmanageable.’ He clearly felt isolated and misunderstood, but no-one was listening. His IQ was 79 at age 11. After Lester’s acknowledgement of the appropriateness of his anger, the boy’s attitude was transformed and he was ready to accept educational opportunities. His IQ had risen to 129 by age 17 and he went on to make a successful career.
Flynn effect can be attributed to conscientiousness due to humans being status-seekers. This means that the average person uses their brains a lot more efficiently and harder than their smarter ancestral counterparts.
What this translates to is that people will score a lot better on tests despite being dumber because there’s a lot more need to use your brain during Malthusian moments than during times of abundance.