Smarter Every Year? Mystery of the Rising IQs
May 28, 2015
The Wall Street Journal:
Are you smarter than your great-grandmom? If IQ really measures intelligence, the answer is probably a resounding “yes.”
IQ tests are “normed”: Your score reflects how you did compared with other people, like being graded on a curve. But the test designers, who set the average in a given year at 100, have to keep “renorming” the tests, adding harder questions. That’s because absolute performance on IQ tests—the actual number of questions people get right—has greatly improved over the last 100 years. It’s called the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, a social scientist at New Zealand’s University of Otago who first noticed it in the 1980s.
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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