Are we becoming morally smarter? The connection between increasing IQs, decreasing violence, and economic liberalism.

• Author: Shermer, Michael

IN THE 1980s, social scientist James Flynn made a startling discovery: Real IQ scores had been going up, on average, three points every decade since the early 20th century. The existence of this increase had been masked by the fact that the test gets updated and renormed every generation or so, pushing the average score back to 100.

The implications of the eponymous "Flynn effect" are astonishing. A person of average intelligence today would have registered a full two standard deviations higher a century ago, giving him a "very superior" score of 130. We're getting smarter. A lot smarter.

The cause of the Flynn effect is still the subject of debate, but it's not just that we're getting better at taking tests. If that were the case, intelligence scores throughout the test's subcategories should have improved across the board. But results in areas such as information, arithmetic, and vocabulary have nudged only slightly upward over the past half-century when test taking became ubiquitous. Instead, the increases have occurred almost exclusively in the two subtests that most require abstract reasoning (and are least sensitive to education and practice): similarities and matrices.

The section called similarities asks questions such as "What do dogs and rabbits have in common?" If you answer, "Both are mammals," says Flynn, you are thinking like a scientist in classifying organisms by type--an abstraction. If you said, "You use dogs to hunt rabbits," you are thinking concretely, imagining a tangible use for a dog. Matrices are abstract figures that require determining a pattern and then deducing the missing piece, as in the example below.

The improved performance in these two areas (and not the others) suggests that an explanation may be found in broader social changes in society that have led to more abstract reasoning. Instead of manipulating plows, cows, and machinery as almost everyone did in the 19th century, many more of us are now manipulating words, numbers, and symbols. Our economy shifted from agriculture and industry to information, demanding more conceptual, abstract thinking at every level of life.

Flynn himself attributes the effect to an accelerating capacity for people to view the world through "scientific spectacles." During a Skeptic magazine interview, he recalled research by the psychologist Alexander Luria on the reasoning abilities of Russian peasants a century before: "The illiterate Russian peasants Luria studied were not willing to take the hypothetical seriously. He said, 'Imagine that bears come from where there is always snow and imagine that if bears come from where there is always snow they are white. What color would the bears be at the North Pole ?' and they would respond something like, 'I've only seen brown bears. If an old man came from the North Pole and told me I might believe him.' They were not interested in the hypothetical, or abstract categories. They were grounded in concrete reality. 'There are no camels in Germany. B is in Germany. Are there camels there?' They said, 'Well, it's big enough, there ought to be camels. Or maybe it's too small to have camels.'"

Flynn and his colleague William Dickens suggest that the increases in reasoning abilities may have started centuries ago with the industrial revolution...