Researcher James Flynn of the University of Otago identified a surprising phenomenon: “We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generation. (…) Indeed, if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. Now this has raised all sorts of questions,” Flynn said during a TED conference in 2013. The phenomenon has become known as the “Flynn effect.”
As an example, Flynn points to an experiment conducted by psychologist Alexander Luria in the early twentieth century. “Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world. (…) He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn’t deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions,” Flynn says.
The situation can be explained by the nature and level of education in the past. In 2025, for example, the proportion of people in the United States who complete twelve years of schooling is far higher than it once was. Likewise, whereas in 1900 only 3 percent of Americans worked in occupations requiring advanced cognitive skills, that figure has now risen to 35 percent, according to Flynn.
Greater emphasis is also placed today on hypothetical situations. “Now, not only do we have much more education, much of that education is scientific, and you can’t do science without classifying the world. You can’t do science without proposing hypotheses. You can’t do science without making it logically consistent.” The educational model itself has also changed, shifting from one centered on memorisation and the learning of concrete facts to one that emphasises connections and the development of more abstract forms of thinking.
Different opportunities
People today can consider themselves privileged. They have “the chance to properly display their true IQ” because they benefit from “more opportunities for educating the scientific mind,” says Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive psychologist at New York University, in an article for Psychology Today.
This does not mean, however, that earlier generations were less intelligent than those of today, as Flynn himself points out. “They were quite capable of on-the-spot problem solving in the concrete situations that dominated their lives,” the researcher writes in his book What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect. It is also important to recognise that the demands people faced a century ago were vastly different from those they encounter today.
The modern generation and its blind spots
Although the evidence shows that today’s generations perform better on intelligence tests and have developed cognitive skills that our ancestors did not possess a century ago, “we haven’t made progress on all fronts,” Flynn says. He pointed, for example, to what he describes as the “ahistorical” nature of many young Americans, arguing that they know little about the history of their own country or the wider world and do not read literature, instead living in a “present-tense bubble.” “Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions,” the researcher said during his TED talk.
