Are We Getting Dumber?
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Published in
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4 min read
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Nov 16, 2021
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Or is something else going on?
Graph showing the “Flynn Effect”. (Our World in Data)
A new meta-study shows that three facets of emotional intelligence have been plummeting in the last twenty years. Researchers found that, while overall EI trait did not change, the subgroupings of “well-being”, “self-control” and “emotionality” showed significant decreases. They correlate this to an increase in technology use, but do not explicitly call it out as the reason (causative factors are hard to prove). This study is not alone. An earlier study showed that people born after 1975 are showing a decrease in mean IQ. So, are we getting dumber?
The Flynn Effect
For many years, we have seen the somewhat self-congratulatory Flynn Effect in IQ scores across the world. This effect shows an increase in “real” IQ levels since the early part of the 1900s in most areas. When people take a current IQ test, the scores are corrected so that the mean value is set to 100. When people take older versions of tests, their score tends to be well above 100. A study showed that British children gained an average of over 14 IQ points from 1942 to 2008. (Author’s note: Interestingly, the paper also showed that gains started to decrease after 1979, and even reversed in some cases, just like our example above.)
There have been many explanations for the Flynn effect: improvements in nutrition, vaccines, familiarity with the test questions, improvement in education, and others. What these tests show us is that it is possible for humans, as a whole, to get better at certain types of tasks. We already know this.
But people from earlier times weren’t necessarily less intelligent, were they? In fact, some people argue our ancestors were more intelligent, and that we are not smarter than our ancestors at all. After all, they built wonders like the Pyramids and the Great Wall thousands of years ago, using only math and primitive tools. So what’s going on here? Are people today smarter or not?
What is intelligence, anyways?
Does math make one intelligent? (Max Fischer)
Typically, things like IQ tests look at very narrow dimensions of intelligence. It also requires a certain amount of motivation to do well on…
