The "America's Cultural Decline Into Idiocy" group is all about poking lighthearted fun at the questionable things people do or say. However, the concerns about America's average IQ expressed in the group's description are true to an extent. And the U.S. isn't the only one in trouble, as scientists all over the world are noticing a trend of plummeting average IQ scores, also called the Reverse Flynn Effect.
In the 1980s, a social scientist, James Flynn, noticed that people were becoming more and more intelligent throughout the 20th century. Compared to their parents and grandparents, average people had much better education, reading and comprehension skills, and a basic understanding of scientific facts. Sociologists dubbed this the Flynn Effect. However, nowadays, the curve that kept going upward seems to be trending downward.
Flynn theorized that circumstances made people smarter, not genetics. People started working in offices and industrial jobs and were dealing with more than just physical objects from day to day. Education evolved, as students learned from hypotheticals instead of memorizing facts. Mass media allowed people to think beyond their own personal experiences.
Flynn used this example to explain this shift in people's intelligence: if you were to ask a person 100 years ago what the difference between a dog and a rabbit was, they would've answered, "Dogs hunt rabbits." A person from the 20th century would've replied, "They're both mammals."
Today, researchers find that our collective cognitive abilities are declining. Elizabeth Dworak, an assistant professor at Northwestern University's medical school, analyzed 394,378 IQ tests that Americans took between 2006 and 2018. She saw that people found it increasingly hard to do abstract visual puzzles, pattern recognition, and language-based problem-solving.
The decline in the first two is what concerns scientists the most. Based on these two skills, psychologists measure fluid intelligence. In other words, it's how we learn to adapt to new situations and think "on the fly." However, Dworak cautions not to generalize these findings. "We can't exactly say that people are getting dumber, just that scores in these categories are going down."
Unfortunately, signs of our collective descent into being ignoramuses can be seen in students' exam scores, too. In 2023, it was reported that ACT test scores reached a 30-year low. When comparing reading proficiency scores, the U.S. also tends to be below other developed countries. Although the literacy skills of Americans are at an international OECD average, Finland, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, and Ireland are way ahead.
#15
Some say that elections reflect the average intelligence of a U.S. citizen. In recent years, researchers have been noticing a worrying trend that many American voters are disengaged or low-information voters. When in 2023 the Pew Research Center asked Americans some basic political knowledge questions (how Congress works, what a filibuster is, what happens when a presidential election is tied, etc.), few could answer many of them correctly. For example, only 44% could tell the length of a full Senate term. Another study shows that only six in 10 Americans can name their representative.
Still, the question remains: why is this happening? Why are we, potentially, becoming dumber? Researchers have a few potential answers.
- Intelligence levels cannot grow forever and have to reach a plateau at some point.
- Our health is declining, leading to lower cognitive abilities.
- Quality of education decreased or the content changed; that's why we're having a harder time with nonverbal and mathematical reasoning.
- We, as a society, started valuing visual-spatial skills more instead of reasoning skills.
- Our smartphones are decreasing our cognitive capacity.
