A group of psychologists, two from Northwestern University and the third from the University of Oregon, has found via online testing that IQ scores in the U.S. may be dropping for the first time in nearly a century. In their paper published in the journal Intelligence, Elizabeth Dworak, William Revelle and David Condon describe analyzing the results of online IQ tests taken by volunteers over the years 2006 to 2018.
This is not that surprising. The people who took online tests in 2006 may have been earlier adopters, and and thus slightly smarter than later test takers. Second, it's impossible to make an extrapolation about online tests ad being applicable to IQs a century ago.
As it's said in the paper:
As the annual sample sizes have increased in more recent years and the SAPA Project has discussed in more public outlets such social media (mistressredditor, 2013; Murray, 2017; SAPAPsych, 2014a, SAPAPsych, 2014b) or online articles (Guarino, 2018), it's plausible that newer annual samples are more “average” or normal representation than those recruited during the SAPA Project's former years.
I don't think it's supposable to conclude that flynn effect is reversing
The researchers behind one of the Norwegian studies have made some very weird arguments in public statements that aren't part of their research.
They said that the drops in IQ are not explainable by immigration, but this is something that is only the case in their own study in Norway where the IQ drop was something like 1-1.2 points per decade, while the countries with big drops-- France and the UK have drops that are about 3.2-4.3 times higher.
They try to end the article with some feel-good hand-waiving, but so many things have changed since the mid 1970s, that it feels ridiculous to use lack of formal reasoning as an excuse. Since there's no data on it, nor on "fluid intelligence", there's no reason to assume later generations have more or less of either. If they do lack "crystallized intelligence", they did indeed become dumber.
You will do well to remember the racist history of IW tests. Maybe we should be celebrating that scores are going down on what is essentially a racist test.
There's a lot of analysis on this that is really easy to Google, so this is just the gist. Essentially, intelligence is an abstract and subjective quality. IQ correlates with what the big names in academia agreed were "smart people", back when such institutions were largely racially segregated. In particular a numeric/"empirical" standard was pushed for to give more credibility to eugenics.
IQ also correlates with many other other things such as reaction time and other real, measurable phenomena, so to say 'yeah but that's just like, your opinion' is nonsense.
All things being equal IQ could have some value however, bearing in mind I'm simplifying here, not all things are equal. IQ is designed to quantify intelligence, not reaction time. Don't just go by the comments here, even mine. Look into the history of IQ tests, for what purpose they were designed, and what they really test for.
One of the most oft-cited examples is of an intelligence test asking questions like "Dish is to place mat as teacup is to _____" where the correct answer is saucer - making the test biased in favour of people who use place mats and saucers at home.
I suspect that a familiarity level with western-style IQ tests may be part of the story as well.
I was issued such tests several times as a young child. The first time, I cried and did miserably. It was all so strange and unfamiliar. Had never seen logic puzzles before and didn't understand what they were asking of me.
My mom took me back a few weeks later and paid for me to re-take another IQ test. I did so well they placed me in "gifted" classes where I remained throughout my primary education. I didn't magically get smarter; I just became more comfortable with the test format.
I had a similar experience as an adult in my late 20s. Bought a Mensa book containing two practice exams. Took one and fell about 15 points (a full standard deviation!!!) shy of my childhood score. A week later I took the second test and equaled my childhood score almost exactly. Again, I am assuming I didn't sprout a bunch of new synaptic connections.
I suspect that second chances like these and familiarity with IQ tests in general correspond tightly with socioeconomic background. The more privilege you have, the more likely you are to get the chance to become comfortable with these sorts of tests and score closer to your maximum personal potential.
If I, an American, take an IQ test right now... I'm probably going to score better than somebody from another part of the world with equal intelligence who's never seen one of those tests before.
You start with the dogma that race isn't a real thing, and only a social construct and we know this to be true with 100% certainty. Then anything that shows a difference between races must be false, and also racist, or else the dogma isn't true.
On a related note, iodine deficiency was a massive cause of "cretinism" (hypothyroidism, which in pregnant people results in lowered IQ in their children) in parts of the US until iodinised salt became widely available. With the decline of home cooking and the increased popularity of artisinal salts and sea salt, there have been predictions that iodine deficiency might make a comeback in those regions and lowered IQ would be one of the earliest indicators.
Not in the US, but here I get the sense that a lot of people buy non-iodized salt. When I ask people why, it often boils down to them being conditioned by marketing to think foods marked as "without X" are universally more healthy. I also see this with non-celiac sufferers avoiding gluten, and "lactose intolerant" people who needlessly avoid lactose(avoiding lactose actually makes you lactose intolerant even if you weren't before! And getting a little gasy from dairy is hardly intolerance. Flatulence is a natural reaction to, you know, eating food).
Yeah I've seen it in the US too (non-iodized salt being "better").
I'm not celiac but allergic to wheat, and it's kind of annoying when I look for a gluten free option (because it's more familiar than wheat free, and generally equivalent) how quickly other people will jump to follow my "example" as if I've played some kind of moral trump card. But at least in that case it's leading to a wider variety of grain choices without many negatives I know of. In the case of milk and salt it's often blindly reducing the nutritional value.
Yes, the point isn't just that fewer people cook at home but that people who do cook at home more frequently use non-idiodinised salt because idionised salt is the most boring and conventional option and home cooking has moved from a chore to a recreational activity. So you have people going to restaurants, which often don't use idionised salt; people eating prepared meals, which often don't contain extra iodine; and people cooking at home, who use artisinal pink Hamalayan sea salt or similar fancy salts which naturally don't contain the added iodine.
Growing up I always wondered why there was "iodinised" table salt and other salt and why we had "iodinised" salt. Only knowing that some people in my extended family couldn't have iodine and seeing that more expensive salts don't contain iodine, my impression was always that iodinised salt was somehow cheaper and worse quality. I think a lot of people feel the same way about gluten or lactose, especially when they hear about people reacting badly to it. After all if it hurts some people, it must be unhealthy, right? Nevermind that gluten is literally just wheat protein and they had no issue eating a whole plate of seitan "chicken", which is literally almost pure gluten.
Well a decade or more ago the idea of an online iq test was in the realms of "maybe iq is pretty dumb but there's no harm in doing this online." Nowadays I think most of us think more along the lines of "How stupid would you have to be to do an online quiz like this?" Is it phishing? Is it goog-facebrick spying? Can the people serving this keep it secure? Will it screw up a loan application or health insurance in 10 years time? Self selection criteria have changed for the same population.
IQ tests are sometimes good at identifying people with very real intellectual problems, I'm told. The bottom tail. Utterly useless for anything else in science.
People still love them, much of psychology still acts more like a religious cult than science and still venerates them. For anyone interested in something more than "feelings as evidence" and "bullshit to get a TED talk invite" dismissing any study using iq out of hand with extreme prejudice is likely to save you some time. Are there any at all? The preface justifying iq test usage as evidence in the face of so much junk science would be necessary and something to read.
/me waves to the psychologists who believe (believe so hard) they're about to respond with the usual tropes of "you just embarrassed yourself" before sending the link on their slack channels to make sure it's properly downvoted. How's the replication crisis guys? Your 101 textbooks all still full of the stanford prison experiment? The brain is fascinating, psychology is poetry masquerading as science about it. Clean up your discpline's act or just move to liberal arts and stop defiling real science. "Not me, I don't..." Then call it out, loudly. Starting with the 101 textbooks at your institution. Count the discredited studies that make "great stories" for freshmen that have been totally discredited. The correct number you should get to in your count is zero in case that isn't clear.
I enjoyed that little rant. Should be more of them about such garbage as iq.
"Psychometrics is a soft science with serious replication problems except for IQ which is as hard as physics and reliable enough to be used to stereotype large groups of people and draw broad sweeping conclusions about politics, ethics, and sociology." - The IQ crowd
> Beyond inconsistencies in demographics across the sample, another factor that could be accounting for lower scores for more recent participants could be due to a decline in motivation. As the SAPA Project is advertised as a personality survey, individuals seeking out the SAPA Project may not be fully engaged with items not measuring temperament at the capacity as they are with more typically considered personality items.
A bigger issue to me is
> it should also be recognized that the SAPA Project relies on participants finding or seeking out the survey; meaning members of the population do not have an equal probability of being recruited into the survey (Condon, 2018). Thus, selection bias has likely been introduced into the sample due to those voluntarily taking the survey being non-representative of the target population
I could see the result simply showing that the Internet (and/or college) has become more accessible since 2006 and sampling the online population reflects this. If we did online IQ tests starting the in late 80s, I'd imagine we would see a bigger downward trend during the 90s. On the other hand, King of the Hill was making fun of online IQ tests in 2002, so maybe they wouldn't be so hard to access.
Assuming the study is robust, here is one possible contribution. In the US in 2021, 52 million people reported using cannabis in the previous 12 months.
https://www.samhsa.gov/data/report/2021-nsduh-annual-nationa...
A meta analysis from 2020 reports an 'almost 2-point decline in IQ' following frequent or dependent cannabis use in youth.
While accepting that family level vulnerability predisposing to IQ decline is possible, the authors conclude this is unlikely to be fully explanatory of the effect. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291720005036 (Medicine 51, 194–200)
An unlikely but sadly possible explanation is COVID itself. We know even mild cases cause loss of brain mass.[1] There are no studies (to my knowledge) in whether sequential infections cause this loss every time, and whether the brain mass is replaced in between.
Worst case, everyone gets slightly dumber each time they catch COVID. First sight of this would be a general decrease in IQ tests across population, as we're seeing here.
Still, I'd place a fairly low probability of this being the case, simply because we're not yet seeing any more severe effets.
"Comparing brain volume before and after individuals were exposed to SARS-CoV-2, this study documents significant cortical gray matter loss, equivalent to nearly 10 years of aging." [1]
This paper feels methodologically iffy. I'd be willing to bet money that, if you don't stratify by education level, the decline is not stat-sig, or IQ even grew. This trend, and the way they reported it, screams Simpson's paradox to me. I.e. the headline should be "more lower-IQ people went to college" not "college graduates' IQ is dropping"
Who the heck wouldn't report a number like "Since 2006, average IQ has dropped X%"?
Does that mean my IQ has been dropping all this time because I took the test a long time ago, like putting cash under my mattress in an inflationary economy?
It would only have explanatory value if you could prove that "intelligent" people have become relatively less fertile over time, compared to the population as a whole.
Of course, historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently always struggled with fertility. There's also the nagging issue that even highly stratified societies aren't that stable on evolutionary timescales.
>historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently always struggled with fertility
Do you have a source for this? I've read that it was the opposite until the 19th century. (Supposedly the source for this claim is "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World".)
>Of course, historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently always struggled with fertility.
This is exactly backwards; in the medieval and early modern era the wealthy had many more surviving kids than the poor. This has been established by birth and marriage records. The reason is because in these eras, physical survival was a challenge, and contraceptives did not exist, so the wealthy were the ones who could afford to keep their kids alive and healthy in large numbers.
This is part of why there was so much competition among siblings for the titles and positions of their parents; there was never enough to go around so the life of each person was a constant struggle against the overall flow of downward mobility.
> in the medieval and early modern era the wealthy had many more surviving kids than the poor
Per Figure 2 of Fertility trends by social status by Vergard Skirbekk[1], we see that -- globally -- high social class begins to exert an overall negative pressure pressure on fertility relative to the lower classes as early as the start of the 1700s. So, yes, "Always" was a wrong description on my part, as we do see the opposite relationship during the early premodern and late medieval periods.
It would have been more accurate of me to say something like: "historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently struggled with fertility for hundreds of years".
> contraceptives did not exist
Contraceptives did indeed exist. The much fabled Silphium springs to mind. Those of higher social class would certainly have had better access to experienced practitioners and the various abortifacient concoctions which might have currently been in fashion.
> physical survival was a challenge [...] so the wealthy were the ones who could afford to keep their kids alive and healthy in large number
On the other hand... there were much stronger incentives for agrarian family units to have children. More children meant more labor. More labor meant more land productivity. Agricultural success often went hand-in-hand with copious production of children.
As educational systems take on ancillary roles and duties and educational rigor is de-emphasized this should be of little surprise.
When I went to school your teacher read out your grades as they were passed back to you, or stapled the results to a corkboard. Now, it's all in private and kids don't have the same peer pressure to do better. There is more coddling in schools, but at the high end, we see another problem, the children of the professional class are applied more and more pressure and sent to more and more demanding after school programs and a few of those end up with very high stress and sometimes driven to suicide.
There is definitely a bifurcation in education but overall a deterioration in pedagogy and the kids who need it most are suffering the most.
> Now, it's all in private and kids don't have the same peer pressure to do better.
They also wouldn't have the pressure to not do as well either. Being the one student in class to get an A on the difficult exam wasn't exactly going to make you popular, and some students even wore their shit grades as a badge of honor.
Yes, I knew those kids and there was very little that could have helped them other than more parental care and involvement in their academics. They wore it as a badge because it's the only badge they could wear. For those[1] you cut your losses but one should be careful to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.
[1] For these kids a "Gymnasium/Hauptschule" system might help them where kids who obviously don't have the aptitude to learn, can be productively diverted into vocational schools as, in practice, by fits and starts that's where they end up, if they avoid drifting into crime. Most I knew were able to avoid crime that landed you in jail, but some succumbed to it.
This trend has been going on for a while. Here are some snippets, some about personal experiences and others about the shortage of qualified teachers (obviously this leads to teachers not even knowing anything beyond what is presented in the textbook). Another major problem is violence permeating into schools which disturbs academics outside the school and within.
Also, this is not unique to the US. Other countries are also seeing an incursion of "achievement stickers" for everyone in lieu of academics.
65 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadThis is not that surprising. The people who took online tests in 2006 may have been earlier adopters, and and thus slightly smarter than later test takers. Second, it's impossible to make an extrapolation about online tests ad being applicable to IQs a century ago.
As it's said in the paper:
As the annual sample sizes have increased in more recent years and the SAPA Project has discussed in more public outlets such social media (mistressredditor, 2013; Murray, 2017; SAPAPsych, 2014a, SAPAPsych, 2014b) or online articles (Guarino, 2018), it's plausible that newer annual samples are more “average” or normal representation than those recruited during the SAPA Project's former years.
I don't think it's supposable to conclude that flynn effect is reversing
Lol, it's reversing all across western Europe and has been since birth cohorts starting around 1970. The Norwegian studies are the most cited AFAIK.
They said that the drops in IQ are not explainable by immigration, but this is something that is only the case in their own study in Norway where the IQ drop was something like 1-1.2 points per decade, while the countries with big drops-- France and the UK have drops that are about 3.2-4.3 times higher.
They try to end the article with some feel-good hand-waiving, but so many things have changed since the mid 1970s, that it feels ridiculous to use lack of formal reasoning as an excuse. Since there's no data on it, nor on "fluid intelligence", there's no reason to assume later generations have more or less of either. If they do lack "crystallized intelligence", they did indeed become dumber.
Would you care to elaborate on the famously racist parts ( and ideally what is racist about them ? )
I was issued such tests several times as a young child. The first time, I cried and did miserably. It was all so strange and unfamiliar. Had never seen logic puzzles before and didn't understand what they were asking of me.
My mom took me back a few weeks later and paid for me to re-take another IQ test. I did so well they placed me in "gifted" classes where I remained throughout my primary education. I didn't magically get smarter; I just became more comfortable with the test format.
I had a similar experience as an adult in my late 20s. Bought a Mensa book containing two practice exams. Took one and fell about 15 points (a full standard deviation!!!) shy of my childhood score. A week later I took the second test and equaled my childhood score almost exactly. Again, I am assuming I didn't sprout a bunch of new synaptic connections.
I suspect that second chances like these and familiarity with IQ tests in general correspond tightly with socioeconomic background. The more privilege you have, the more likely you are to get the chance to become comfortable with these sorts of tests and score closer to your maximum personal potential.
If I, an American, take an IQ test right now... I'm probably going to score better than somebody from another part of the world with equal intelligence who's never seen one of those tests before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35086599
I'm not celiac but allergic to wheat, and it's kind of annoying when I look for a gluten free option (because it's more familiar than wheat free, and generally equivalent) how quickly other people will jump to follow my "example" as if I've played some kind of moral trump card. But at least in that case it's leading to a wider variety of grain choices without many negatives I know of. In the case of milk and salt it's often blindly reducing the nutritional value.
Growing up I always wondered why there was "iodinised" table salt and other salt and why we had "iodinised" salt. Only knowing that some people in my extended family couldn't have iodine and seeing that more expensive salts don't contain iodine, my impression was always that iodinised salt was somehow cheaper and worse quality. I think a lot of people feel the same way about gluten or lactose, especially when they hear about people reacting badly to it. After all if it hurts some people, it must be unhealthy, right? Nevermind that gluten is literally just wheat protein and they had no issue eating a whole plate of seitan "chicken", which is literally almost pure gluten.
IQ tests are sometimes good at identifying people with very real intellectual problems, I'm told. The bottom tail. Utterly useless for anything else in science.
People still love them, much of psychology still acts more like a religious cult than science and still venerates them. For anyone interested in something more than "feelings as evidence" and "bullshit to get a TED talk invite" dismissing any study using iq out of hand with extreme prejudice is likely to save you some time. Are there any at all? The preface justifying iq test usage as evidence in the face of so much junk science would be necessary and something to read.
/me waves to the psychologists who believe (believe so hard) they're about to respond with the usual tropes of "you just embarrassed yourself" before sending the link on their slack channels to make sure it's properly downvoted. How's the replication crisis guys? Your 101 textbooks all still full of the stanford prison experiment? The brain is fascinating, psychology is poetry masquerading as science about it. Clean up your discpline's act or just move to liberal arts and stop defiling real science. "Not me, I don't..." Then call it out, loudly. Starting with the 101 textbooks at your institution. Count the discredited studies that make "great stories" for freshmen that have been totally discredited. The correct number you should get to in your count is zero in case that isn't clear.
I enjoyed that little rant. Should be more of them about such garbage as iq.
> Beyond inconsistencies in demographics across the sample, another factor that could be accounting for lower scores for more recent participants could be due to a decline in motivation. As the SAPA Project is advertised as a personality survey, individuals seeking out the SAPA Project may not be fully engaged with items not measuring temperament at the capacity as they are with more typically considered personality items.
A bigger issue to me is
> it should also be recognized that the SAPA Project relies on participants finding or seeking out the survey; meaning members of the population do not have an equal probability of being recruited into the survey (Condon, 2018). Thus, selection bias has likely been introduced into the sample due to those voluntarily taking the survey being non-representative of the target population
I could see the result simply showing that the Internet (and/or college) has become more accessible since 2006 and sampling the online population reflects this. If we did online IQ tests starting the in late 80s, I'd imagine we would see a bigger downward trend during the 90s. On the other hand, King of the Hill was making fun of online IQ tests in 2002, so maybe they wouldn't be so hard to access.
As is often the case, definitive conclusions are hard to come by. An earlier study found 'little evidence' to support this 'cannabis effect'. https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.1516648113
Worst case, everyone gets slightly dumber each time they catch COVID. First sight of this would be a general decrease in IQ tests across population, as we're seeing here.
Still, I'd place a fairly low probability of this being the case, simply because we're not yet seeing any more severe effets.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2022/03/21/a-c...
"Comparing brain volume before and after individuals were exposed to SARS-CoV-2, this study documents significant cortical gray matter loss, equivalent to nearly 10 years of aging." [1]
Who the heck wouldn't report a number like "Since 2006, average IQ has dropped X%"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
Of course, historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently always struggled with fertility. There's also the nagging issue that even highly stratified societies aren't that stable on evolutionary timescales.
They still had plenty of kids, and their kids didn't suffer from early deaths nearly as much as among the poor.
Do you have a source for this? I've read that it was the opposite until the 19th century. (Supposedly the source for this claim is "A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World".)
This is exactly backwards; in the medieval and early modern era the wealthy had many more surviving kids than the poor. This has been established by birth and marriage records. The reason is because in these eras, physical survival was a challenge, and contraceptives did not exist, so the wealthy were the ones who could afford to keep their kids alive and healthy in large numbers.
This is part of why there was so much competition among siblings for the titles and positions of their parents; there was never enough to go around so the life of each person was a constant struggle against the overall flow of downward mobility.
Per Figure 2 of Fertility trends by social status by Vergard Skirbekk[1], we see that -- globally -- high social class begins to exert an overall negative pressure pressure on fertility relative to the lower classes as early as the start of the 1700s. So, yes, "Always" was a wrong description on my part, as we do see the opposite relationship during the early premodern and late medieval periods.
It would have been more accurate of me to say something like: "historically, we see that the rich and educated upper echelons of society have apparently struggled with fertility for hundreds of years".
> contraceptives did not exist
Contraceptives did indeed exist. The much fabled Silphium springs to mind. Those of higher social class would certainly have had better access to experienced practitioners and the various abortifacient concoctions which might have currently been in fashion.
> physical survival was a challenge [...] so the wealthy were the ones who could afford to keep their kids alive and healthy in large number
On the other hand... there were much stronger incentives for agrarian family units to have children. More children meant more labor. More labor meant more land productivity. Agricultural success often went hand-in-hand with copious production of children.
[1]: https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol18/5/
When I went to school your teacher read out your grades as they were passed back to you, or stapled the results to a corkboard. Now, it's all in private and kids don't have the same peer pressure to do better. There is more coddling in schools, but at the high end, we see another problem, the children of the professional class are applied more and more pressure and sent to more and more demanding after school programs and a few of those end up with very high stress and sometimes driven to suicide.
There is definitely a bifurcation in education but overall a deterioration in pedagogy and the kids who need it most are suffering the most.
They also wouldn't have the pressure to not do as well either. Being the one student in class to get an A on the difficult exam wasn't exactly going to make you popular, and some students even wore their shit grades as a badge of honor.
[1] For these kids a "Gymnasium/Hauptschule" system might help them where kids who obviously don't have the aptitude to learn, can be productively diverted into vocational schools as, in practice, by fits and starts that's where they end up, if they avoid drifting into crime. Most I knew were able to avoid crime that landed you in jail, but some succumbed to it.
Also, this is not unique to the US. Other countries are also seeing an incursion of "achievement stickers" for everyone in lieu of academics.
http://www.csun.edu/~ar8361/paper1.html
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/...
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-us-broken-education-...
https://www.studentachievement.org/wp-content/uploads/Rigor_...
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35049500
2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079782
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35109057
4. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35086599
edit: formatting
Here's why: [copy-paste from logical fallacies website written by another angry 13 year old].
Counter-point: [copy-paste from Wikipedia].