Despite the evidence of the senses, there is a claim that intelligence is increasing. What? Well IQ scores are supposed to be increasing. A thought-provoking blog on Comment-is-Free discusses this idea and refers to a recent book by Flynn who identified what is called the Flynn effect.

There is much discussion on Wikipedia and elsewhere about possible reasons for the effect, some of them very plausible – such as Flynn’s own argument that rises have taken place only in the area of hypothetical thinking and reflect technological development. This is very interesting (the effect of cultural change on cognitive skills.)

I just doubt if IQ scores can really provide evidence that people are getting smarter,

IQ? The whole concept has a historically-based whiff of spuriousness (unjustified claims of cultural-neutrality, invention of the evidence, use to justify racist and sexist ideas, basis for divisive forms of educational selection, etc.) This spuriousness can’t be dispelled by adding in even more dubious extra “intelligences” to console those who score badly on the main tests.

All the same, used by scientists, with regards to the fact that the scores follow a mean distribution curve, they can tell us things about how able people are at showing specific skills. The main skill required is knowing how to pass them. There is nothing wrong with a test that works like this. The waters just get muddied by us all assuming that they reflect anything else than performance on a narrow set of indicator questions, when these are presented in a particular way.

Like crosswords. Cryptic crosswords defeated me, as a child, until someone explained that you just need to get used to the ways of thinking needed to do them. With knowledge of a few simple rules and a certain level of aptitude for making verbal associations, they become easy. Did I get cleverer in the short time between having no idea how to do crosswords and actually getting great pleasure from the works of Aruacaria? Far from it.

IQ tests are devised by humans. Are the people who sets them all geniuses? They must have superhuman IQs. They know ALL the answers. Who are these gods amongst us? They even possess the keys to knowing what intelligence is. Or, at least, if we think IQ really measures “intelligence”, we must take it that these really are the cleverest people on the planet.

They are academics. No surprises that IQ tests seem to work best as predictors of how someone will perform in a formal academic setting, then. As I said earlier, this would be fine, if we just stopped there and didn’t assume the tests can tell us about “intelligence” itself.

Pop science has helped to spread the idea that IQ tests measure intelligence. Helen Joyce, who wrote the CIF post, said:

The Flynn effect throws up some startling paradoxes. If, as seems to be the case, the average person from 1900 would score around 70 on a modern-day IQ test – which would put them on track for a diagnosis of mental retardation….

Wait a minute. IQ scores get standardised round 100. The distribution of scores follows a bell-shaped curve. The average score in 1900 would be, wait for it,…. 100.

Were IQ tests even invented in 1900? Not according to Wikipedia.

The term “IQ,” a translation of the German Intelligenz-Quotient, was coined by the German psychologist William Stern in 1912 as a proposed method of scoring early modern children’s intelligence tests such as those developed by Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in the early 20th Century.

The first Binet test was produced in 1905. Hmm. In 1900, no one had seen an IQ test because there wasn’t one.

Is this pop-science idea the outcome of some deranged thought experiment, in which we have to imagine both the IQ performance of dead people and a variation in the whole way of working the scores out?

The attempt to look at changes in IQ scores over time can have some comical results.

Neisser estimates that if you extrapolate beyond the data, which shows a 21 point gain between 1952 and 1982, an even larger gain of 35 IQ points can be argued, however Arthur Jensen warns that extrapolating beyond the data leads to results such as an IQ of -1000 for Aristotle (even assuming he would have scored 200 in his day

There are ways to compare scores over time, if you use actual tests and record the results. These should all show a mean of 100 though, so it’s only changes in the shape of distribution curve that would have any explanatory value and these changes are likely to be limited.

Getting people of different ages to do the same tests comes up against the possible effects of changes in the brain over time. In any case, the academic basis of the test questions would depress the scores of older people who were educated in different topics and were not practised in academic thinking.

Getting younger people to do both old and new tests then comparing the scores would tell us more about the part that general social levels of knowledge play in the tests than it would about the intelligence of the test subjects. In any case, surely the scores on the old tests would have to be normalised to 100, so we’d still only be able to spot changes in the bell-shape…….?

1930s research done by Luria, a Soviet-era psychologist, was quoted by Flynn. Central Asian peasants’ answers to “IQ” type questions designed to identify their thinking processes supposedly showed Luria that they thought practically rather than hypothetically. Read the extract on CIF and the image of a peasant (at the time when Stalin was hammering the agrarian sector) stonewalling a potential government spy just leaps out at you. White bear/black bear? 🙂

It certainly does show a much higher level of practical intelligence than Luria seems aware. Practical political intelligence. Plus a fair amount of hidden hypothetical reasoning. Rather than some mentally bound peasant incapacity to think beyond the present, as Luria seemed to imply.

Almost ironically, it seems that Luria learned some lessons about the value of adopting “practical” thought processes pretty quickly. He soon had to make some drastic career changes to avoid Stalin’s attentions. Post-war, he tried to get back into neuro-surgery but

“His plans were interrupted for several years when he was removed from the Institute of Neurosurgery during a period of particularly virulent anti-semitic repression.”

My point here is that Luria was obviously hugely more academically skilled than the central Asian peasant. so he assumed that his thought processes were somehow more advanced. He didn’t credit the peasants with the same capacities for critical thinking as himself because his own social/cultural biases limited his interpretations of the evidence. We all do it, including the interpretors of IQ tests.