Getting dumber: the reverse Flynn effect and the politics of denial

The greatest of follies is to imagine that we can remain wise while ceasing to learn. -Francis Bacon

Once upon a time, human beings appeared to be getting cleverer. Year after year, decade after decade, IQ scores crept upward, a steady, reassuring rise that came to be known as the Flynn Effect, after the New Zealand philosopher-psychologist James R. Flynn, who first documented it in the 1980s.

Flynn found that average IQ scores rose about three IQ points every ten years or so. If you were born in 1980, you would have outscored your parents on the same test. By the 2000s, great-grandparents would have struggled to keep up with the average teenager. It was as if each generation had been drinking from a secret well of enlightenment.

As a species, we were evolving, not through genetic mutation, but through universal education, improved nutrition, and perhaps more affordable books and television. Intelligence was becoming an ever-increasing resource. And then, something happened. The Flynn Effect reversed; IQ scores began to fall. Was it all a mirage, or did the course of human intellectual development really change?

Measuring intelligence

Modern intelligence testing began in Paris in 1905, when the French education department commissioned Alfred Binet to devise a test to identify pupils who could benefit from remedial education.

Psychologists soon expanded Binet's ideas, and his test escaped the classroom and went forth to assess almost everyone: military recruits, factory workers, immigrants, and even the occasional genius. Intelligence had been given a number, simple, seductive, and impossible to resist.

Fast forward to the 1980s. James Flynn noticed that intelligence test numbers weren't static. People in many countries were steadily scoring higher than earlier generations. They were not just memorising more facts; people were reasoning differently. The modern mind, Flynn argued, had learned to think more abstractly. People had learned to deal with symbols, understand graphs, and reason using hypothetical situations.

Flynn's theory was flattering. The modern world, schools, offices, and communications have trained human beings to think like scientists. We weren't just getting smarter; we were becoming more rational. According to Flynn, we learned to classify, reason abstractly, and think hypothetically, skills our ancestors rarely needed.

It was a lovely story: the triumph of environment over heredity, of culture over biology. Intelligence wasn't fixed; human progress was potentially boundless.

To understand what Flynn discovered, we have to peek inside the test itself. IQ is always standardised. This means the average score in any generation is fixed at 100. When Flynn said IQs were rising, he meant that people were answering more questions correctly on the same test than earlier generations did. If you gave your grandmother the 2020 test, she might score 85. Give yourself her 1950 version, and you would probably score 115. To keep the average IQ score at 100, test designers had to make the questions steadily harder.

For decades, it seemed that people were becoming smarter, but around the turn of the millennium, the graphs began to bend the wrong way. People were getting fewer correct answers on the same tests than their parents did. The treadmill of intelligence had reversed. In Norway, Denmark, Finland, Britain, and Australia, places not generally known for intellectual collapse, average IQ scores stopped rising and began to fall.

The trend isn't huge, but it's consistent. Average Norwegian twenty-year-olds today score roughly five to seven points lower than their fathers did at the same age. In the United States, Northwestern University researchers found declines between 2006 and 2018 in three of four cognitive domains tested.

This cannot be genetic; evolution doesn't move that fast. It must be environmental, cultural, and educational, which is to say, self-inflicted.

Explaining the reversal

You might think the reverse Flynn Effect would be headline news, an entire civilisation losing cognitive ability. Instead, it's been greeted with the usual political soundbites. The right blames woke teachers, while the left insists that intelligence is a social construct, and probably 'biased' besides. Schools and universities maintain a discrete silence lest the blame be put on their teaching.

When the thermometer shows a fever, the modern response is to accuse it of bias. So the IQ decline is being rebranded. We are told humanity is not getting less intelligent, just 'differently' intelligent. IQ tests no longer measure what matters in modern life. Mathematics? We have calculators. Spelling? Spell-checkers. Thinking? AI. Intelligence has become as unfashionable as Latin.

The original Flynn Effect boosted our collective self-esteem. It confirmed that progress works: give people education, nutrition, opportunity, and they'll get smarter. The reverse Flynn Effect does the opposite. It suggests that people are reasoning less well than before. That's awkward. It undercuts every political campaign slogan about the 'knowledge economy'. It suggests that modern life, multitasking, social media, and the eternal Instagram scroll may be eroding the very intellectual capacities that once made progress possible. And since no one wants to admit that we are getting dumber, we change the subject.

But IQ tests are not meaningless. IQ correlates strongly with almost everything societies value: learning, problem-solving, innovation, and self-control. That makes falling IQs politically radioactive. If intelligence can rise or fall, then culture matters, and culture can fail.

When The Bell Curve appeared in 1994, suggesting that intelligence was partly heritable and increasingly stratified, it caused a moral panic. The easiest way to avoid similar unpleasantness over the reverse Flynn effect is to pretend that the whole concept of intelligence is passé, a relic of the industrial age, like slide rules and grammar. Thus, today, we no longer speak of intelligence; we speak of skills, creativity, and emotional literacy. Everyone's a genius now, in their own way.

Unfortunately, the world still runs on logic, mathematics, and the ability to tell cause from coincidence. When those atrophy, societies don't become kinder; they become credulous. Flynn himself suspected the gains he discovered could evaporate. He worried that modern culture might stop rewarding abstract thought, that the skills built by reading, conversation, and reasoned argument might decay in a world of screens and slogans.

He was right to worry.

Children now read less, move less, and spend more time in environments designed to distract them. Schools teach 'critical thinking' as a mantra, not a method. It is neither critical nor thinking. Universities reward indignation over argument.

Why reason, when you can simply react?

We used to read books about why humans behave irrationally. Now we behave irrationally and read tweets about it. Even nutrition and sleep, quiet allies of cognition, have worsened. The average teenager today gets less rest than a 1950s factory worker. Add to this the cult of self-esteem, which prizes 'feeling smart' over being smart, and you have a recipe for comfortable mediocrity. We are raising a generation of citizens who feel intensely but think feebly.

Our ancestors sharpened their minds on scarcity; now abundance has made us careless. We skim where they once read deeply. Humanity, having spent a century teaching itself to think, may be teaching itself not to bother.

The decline of attention

Intelligence can recover. Flynn showed that IQs can rise dramatically within a single generation, which means they are not fixed but habitual, the sum of what societies reward and neglect. We could grow cleverer again by restoring the habits that once built intellect: reading, conversation, discipline, and curiosity. But that would require re-valuing intelligence, not as a badge of elitism, but as a civic virtue.

Unfortunately, we are doing the opposite. We tell ourselves that all perspectives are equal, that knowledge is oppressive, that truth is plural. Under such conditions, intelligence looks almost subversive. Flynn's great contribution was to remind us that reason is fragile-that it can flourish only where culture honours it.

Before he died in 2020, Flynn warned that societies that stop exercising rational thought will lose it. Intelligence, he wrote, "is like a muscle: it must be exercised, or it will atrophy". We have been skipping mental gym and calling the barbell biased.

Civilisations, like individuals, can forget what made them strong, trading reflection for distraction, understanding for outrage, and wisdom for convenience. The tragedy is not that intelligence is fading but that it no longer commands respect. The question isn't whether the Flynn Effect is reversing; it's whether we care enough to notice.