An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Americans’ IQ scores are trending in a downward direction. In fact, they’ve been falling for over a decade. According to a press release, in studying intelligence testing data from 2006 to 2018, Northwestern University researchers noticed that test scores in three out of four “cognitive domains” were going down. This is the first time we’ve seen a consistent negative slope for these testing categories, providing tangible evidence of what is known as the “Reverse Flynn Effect.”
In a 1984 study, James Flynn noticed that intelligence test scores had steadily increased since the early 1930s. We call that steady rise the Flynn Effect. Considering that overall intelligence seemed to be increasing faster than could be explained by evolution, the reason increase became a source of debate, with many attributing the change to various environmental factors. But now, it seems that a Reverse Flynn Effect is, well, in effect.
The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data showed drops in logic and vocabulary (known as verbal reasoning), visual problem solving and analogies (known as matrix reasoning), and computational and mathematical abilities (known as letter and number series). Not every domain is going down though, notes the report. “[S]cores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation) followed the opposite pattern, trending upward over the 12-year period.”
“If all the scores were going in the same direction, you could make a nice little narrative about it, but that’s not the case,” says Elizabeth Dworak, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and one of the authors on the study. “We need to do more to dig into it.” She adds: “It doesn’t mean their mental ability is lower or higher; it’s just a difference in scores that are favoring older or newer samples. It could just be that they’re getting worse at taking tests or specifically worse at taking these kinds of tests.”
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