Why are IQ scores rising? Industrialization rewired our minds. | David Epstein | Big Think
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Why are IQ scores rising?
Why are IQ scores rising? Industrialization rewired our minds.
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Human intelligence is increasing by approximately 3 IQ points per decade, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect.
The increases come from one area of intelligence in particular: abstract thinking, which can be tested using puzzles like Raven's Progressive Matrices. Watch this video to see two kinds of puzzles: One your modern mind is perfectly geared for, and another that might just fool you.
In this video, David Epstein recounts a natural experiment in the Soviet Union in the 1930s that tested the intelligence of isolated subsistence farmers compared to people who had been exposed to industrialization. The experiment revealed fascinating information about abstract thinking, intelligence transfer, and how modern life has changed the way we perceive the world.
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DAVID EPSTEIN:
David Epstein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World and The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as an investigative reporter for ProPublica and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Washington, DC.
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TRANSCRIPT:
DAVID EPSTEIN: The Flynn effect is this startling finding that IQ scores, scores on IQ tests around the world, in the 20th century have been rising at a pretty steady rate of about three points per decade. And not only have they been rising at three points per decade, but the scores are rising on the most abstract tests and the most abstract parts of tests.
So, for example, the test that has the fastest rising score Is called Raven's Progressive Matrices. This has nothing to do with anything you've learned in school. It's just patterns, abstract patterns, in a sequence and one is missing, and you have to figure out how to fill in the missing patterns -- pure abstraction. This test was created so that you wouldn't have to bring anything to it that you've learned in life. If Martians landed on Earth, this was supposed to be the test that could determine how clever they were. And yet, it's the place where we've seen the fastest rise in scores, in this abstract thinking skills that aren't really specifically taught anywhere.
When James Flynn, the professor who first noticed this trend, for whom the Flynn effect is named, started wondering what was going on, he went back to some famous studies by a Soviet psychologist named Alexander Luria. And Luria found an incredible natural experiment. In the 1930s when the Soviet Union was nationalizing, essentially, some of the remote territories -- villages that had not been developed for agriculture and they wanted to develop industry in those places -- Luria wondered if taking people who were living in what he called a pre-modern environment where they were subsistence farmers and quickly moving them into modern work, where they had to work together and coordinate schedules and coordinate tasks for agriculture, even have some schooling in some cases, how would that change the way that they think? And so he saw this natural experiment where he came in the middle of this revolution, where dome of these pre-modern villagers -- again using his terminology -- were still in their original environment as subsistence farmers and others were getting connected to the modern world, getting a little bit of schooling; some were being trained to be teachers, others were being appointed to head collective farms and had to start managing people and thinking ahead and setting long-term complicated goals. And what he found was that this actually had a profound effect on the very way that they think. When the pre-modern villagers were given skeins of wool or silk of different colors and hues and asked to organize them into groups, they basically said, 'It can't be done. None of them are similar.' Whereas when some of the villagers who had been touched by modernity were given the same task, they pretty easily grouped them into colors, even if they didn't really have names for those colors, they started to recognize the abstraction of a color for use in grouping.
And the same thing was true with shapes. So for example, a 26-year-old remote villager named Alieva was asked to group certain shapes together. But to her, a square with a solid line was obviously a map and the same square with a dotted line was obviously a watch. She could only see them as these concrete objects, whereas the...
Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/why-are-i...
Watch the newest video from Big Think: https://bigth.ink/NewVideo
Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos: https://bigth.ink/Edge
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Human intelligence is increasing by approximately 3 IQ points per decade, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect.
The increases come from one area of intelligence in particular: abstract thinking, which can be tested using puzzles like Raven's Progressive Matrices. Watch this video to see two kinds of puzzles: One your modern mind is perfectly geared for, and another that might just fool you.
In this video, David Epstein recounts a natural experiment in the Soviet Union in the 1930s that tested the intelligence of isolated subsistence farmers compared to people who had been exposed to industrialization. The experiment revealed fascinating information about abstract thinking, intelligence transfer, and how modern life has changed the way we perceive the world.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DAVID EPSTEIN:
David Epstein is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World and The Sports Gene. He has master's degrees in environmental science and journalism and has worked as an investigative reporter for ProPublica and a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He lives in Washington, DC.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIPT:
DAVID EPSTEIN: The Flynn effect is this startling finding that IQ scores, scores on IQ tests around the world, in the 20th century have been rising at a pretty steady rate of about three points per decade. And not only have they been rising at three points per decade, but the scores are rising on the most abstract tests and the most abstract parts of tests.
So, for example, the test that has the fastest rising score Is called Raven's Progressive Matrices. This has nothing to do with anything you've learned in school. It's just patterns, abstract patterns, in a sequence and one is missing, and you have to figure out how to fill in the missing patterns -- pure abstraction. This test was created so that you wouldn't have to bring anything to it that you've learned in life. If Martians landed on Earth, this was supposed to be the test that could determine how clever they were. And yet, it's the place where we've seen the fastest rise in scores, in this abstract thinking skills that aren't really specifically taught anywhere.
When James Flynn, the professor who first noticed this trend, for whom the Flynn effect is named, started wondering what was going on, he went back to some famous studies by a Soviet psychologist named Alexander Luria. And Luria found an incredible natural experiment. In the 1930s when the Soviet Union was nationalizing, essentially, some of the remote territories -- villages that had not been developed for agriculture and they wanted to develop industry in those places -- Luria wondered if taking people who were living in what he called a pre-modern environment where they were subsistence farmers and quickly moving them into modern work, where they had to work together and coordinate schedules and coordinate tasks for agriculture, even have some schooling in some cases, how would that change the way that they think? And so he saw this natural experiment where he came in the middle of this revolution, where dome of these pre-modern villagers -- again using his terminology -- were still in their original environment as subsistence farmers and others were getting connected to the modern world, getting a little bit of schooling; some were being trained to be teachers, others were being appointed to head collective farms and had to start managing people and thinking ahead and setting long-term complicated goals. And what he found was that this actually had a profound effect on the very way that they think. When the pre-modern villagers were given skeins of wool or silk of different colors and hues and asked to organize them into groups, they basically said, 'It can't be done. None of them are similar.' Whereas when some of the villagers who had been touched by modernity were given the same task, they pretty easily grouped them into colors, even if they didn't really have names for those colors, they started to recognize the abstraction of a color for use in grouping.
And the same thing was true with shapes. So for example, a 26-year-old remote villager named Alieva was asked to group certain shapes together. But to her, a square with a solid line was obviously a map and the same square with a dotted line was obviously a watch. She could only see them as these concrete objects, whereas the...
Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/why-are-i...
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