Last fall, a Norwegian psychology professor named Lars Dehli was asked to give a lecture on intelligence. It had been a while since he had taught the topic, so he looked forward to revisiting it. As he explained in an essay about the experience, he decided to start the lecture by discussing the so-called Flynn Effect—the well-known phenomenon, first observed by James Flynn, whereby measured IQ scores have been steadily increasing since World War II. “It’s always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who have ever lived,” Dehli wrote.
But as he gathered data to build an up-to-date chart, he was “very surprised” by what he discovered: “IQ has actually started to fall.”
Dehli was not the first person to notice this decline. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have been documenting what has become known as the Reverse Flynn Effect. Consider, for example, a recent paper published in the journal Intelligence that studied IQ scores over time in an American population. It found a steady decline in almost every intelligence metric studied as part of a 35-item assessment.
Here’s a chart that shows these declines broken out by education level:
There’s no consensus on the causes of the Reverse Flynn Effect. But in a recent podcast appearance, James Mariott, a critic and columnist for The Times of London, summarized a hypothesis that has been gaining traction: as we switch our information consumption from print to digital devices, our ability to think deeply degrades.
As Marriott explains:
“Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube…print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging. If you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it’s not surprising that people are getting stupider…and that we seem to find that IQ is declining.”
The data on the Reverse Flynn Effect includes several pieces of evidence that support Marriott’s claims. The IQ reversal, for example, seems to begin right around 2010—the point at which smartphones began their rapid ascent to ubiquity. In addition, according to the Northwestern study, the demographic suffering the steepest declines is 18 to 22-year-olds, who also happen to be the heaviest users of smartphones.
As with most psychological findings, it is unlikely that we will ever fully attribute this effect to a single, specific cause. But based on common sense and lived experience, there’s certainly a ring of truth to this device hypothesis.
It’s grown standard to say things like, “my phone is making me so dumb!”, but this is often intended to be a figure of speech; a self-deprecating shorthand for the reality that the things we do on our phone are dumb, or that we spend less time doing “smart” activities than we used to. If these technological interpretations of the Reverse Flynn Effect hold up, it might turn out that this quip is way more literal than we may have originally assumed.
It’s definitely tempting to assign this research to an easy culprit like smartphones, but this feels like pretty clickbaity writing for this setting. There’s no defensible evidence provided in the writing and measures of intelligence like IQ tests are already questionable in their own right. Isn’t it also possible that our past measures of intelligence may be growing out of date as memorization and recall become less important to expertise? I’m not saying I disagree with the premise that turning away from reading print is a net loss and linked to smartphone use, but I think you need to provide a stronger argument than a possible tenuous correlation before making that suggestion
Exactly. We’ll said.
Just wait till AI gets fully integrated!!
This post came at the perfect time, since I was responding to a classmate about how critical thinking might be impacted as AI becomes thoroughly embedded in every facet of our lives. Thank you for the work that you do. Navigating a career in tech is a constant uphill battle against dying brain cells, and your writing continues to provide a hopeful counterpoint.
The most curious thing is the spike at 2011 across all demographics. Is there a hypothesis?
Absent a compelling hypothesis I’d attribute it to sample wobble.
I click the link to the Intelligence journal and the first pop up is “Use the Science Direct AI to find papers faster.” AI is everywhere. Even though its making us stupider the big players wont stop because they’re hoping to become trillionaires. We are living in science fiction movie. VCs should test founders for antisocial personality traits before giving them funding.
I think that as more data emerge, this trend will simply confirm what we know intuitively and experientially to be true. Anyone who engages with this age group, e.g. teachers, has noticed the change, and it’s not encouraging.
Does a calculator degrade our math skills?
Yes. And I’m a licensed civil engineer. Previous generations had to memorize sin / cos/ tan charts and could do those calculations without a calculator. We can do more with a calculator than we can without it, but our raw skills definitely degrade with the use of a calculator.
Great question, I think that there are two (at least)” aspects of “maths skills” that impact on my professional life.
One is the literal mechanics of arithmetic, adding, subtraction, multiplication and division (I still do some of it long hand on paper to keep up some semblance of practice), and I suppose that calculators have an impact on that (anyone still remember their 12 times tables?).
The other aspect where I have become almost illerate (to my shame, chagrin and frustration) is the language of mathematics, where you can stare at technical papers which resemble a development answer to a question in a complex maths exam, loosely linked together with the occasional sentence and explanation and definition of terms, parameters, what have you.
My initial response to these papers is self-esteem melt down (I thought I was an engineer), but, with serious time invested in studying the paper and decoding the language, I can get better. If someone (who has the time and interest in my development) actually walks me through (and translates) the language, I find I grasp the concepts quite quickly.
But where I find the biggest gap is in this language of mathematics (maybe a bit like the language of coding?).
I don’t think calculators have done any harm to that aspect of our development. I think maybe spreadsheets and their functions have had some level of negative impact, but since my knowledge of Excel really tanks, I can’t be sure.
Sorry for the ramble, hope it makes sense.
Absolutely. Sometimes useful, but usually the easy way out, compared to spending a few seconds doing the math in your head or on paper. I practice math while shopping, to find the better deal, which is often counter intuitive, i.e. The larger or family size is often more per ounce. Peanut Butter, tuna fish and soda come to mind, PS
Yes
After I read the premise of this study I knew what the answer was before I read on. People don’t use their brains for figuring out problems anymore, they just use a computer or a calculator, and now AI just does everything for you. People don’t know how to do anything anymore.
I was at a Panera store one time about 2011, I ordered the salad and the bill was about $10.38. I handed the girl a $20 bill, but the register was broken. In my head I can quickly deduce the money due back was $9.62. I knew this because growing up in the ’60s and 70s we didn’t use a calculator to do our basic math skills, we use pencil paper in our brains . She had to bring out a calculator to figure out the difference. I knew right then and there we were in big trouble.
If you really want to ramp up the anxiety, give a young (or even not-so-young) clerk $20.10 on a $15.08 tab. Not only does the math elude them, the reason behind throwing in the extra dime isn’t even on their radar. 🙂
Exactly on point in actual life experience for me.
exactly. Been there couple of times. This started already around 2015
Considering IQ drops as we get older I wonder what this looks like when stratified by age?
Nicholas Carr touches on the effects screens are having on our brains in “The Shallows” (2010/2020). I can’t quote the source of his claims, but I recall the conclusion: screens only engage the sense of sight, while tactile mediums engage sight, hearing (turning pages), and touch. If you accept the premis that more senses engaged equals higher reading retention levels, this is a no-brainer. Pun intended.
When Charles Lindbergh became the first man to fly the Atlantic in 1927 it touched off an aviation frenzy in the U.S., particularly amoung young boys. Millions of them then engaged in the hobby of building and flying model airplanes. Essentially a generation of youth traveled a self-taught curiculuum in which they learned simple design and construction, and developed their fine motor and artistic skills while learning to build increasingly complex models. Through this they developed an intuitive understanding of strength of materials, engineering (and other related topics), the ability to follow complex directions and to interpret (two-dimensional) plans into a physical reality. These same boys grew into the men who proceeded to become the engineers, fabricators, mechanics, and pilots who won WWII and took us to the moon. At that time the phrase “Model Building builds Model Boys” was coined to recognize the significant benefit of learning to build balsa and tissue model airplanes. Why does any of this matter? We have lost the linkage between hobby and career. We have forgotten the importance of engaging young people in active use of their brains, and the all-important linkage of their minds to their hands. We instead have allowed passive entertainment to fill their time and smother their self-development. I received a note from my Grandson recently and was appalled by the level of his hand-printing (not hand-writing, since schools no longer empasize writing skills and cursive). Please take notice of how many people write (more correctly: scrawl) no finer than a third-grader! This is an indication of their fine motor skills. Without these, we are not much better than being able to rub two sticks together. Apparently, this is where we are heading. Declining IQs indeed!
I graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. The smartest guy in our class had a certified IQ of 180. Ironically, he was a lousy officer once he got his commission, and made numerous (and some egregious) errors out in the field. Conversely, I was lucky to serve in Vietnam with two guys who were at the bottom of the class; one won the Silver Star, the other died after saving several shipmates from drowning after our minesweeper was blown up in the Mekong Delta.
Some of the smartest people I know — even Millennials and Gen-Z’rs — didn’t go to fancy colleges or, if they did, had no academic distinctions, but they were smart businesspeople.
Moral: Give yourself enough time and water over the dam, and you’ll see that IQ doesn’t mean much.