{"id":316329,"date":"2026-05-18T12:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=316329"},"modified":"2026-05-17T15:33:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T14:33:27","slug":"iq-scores-are-falling-but-no-were-not-growing-more-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2026\/05\/iq-scores-are-falling-but-no-were-not-growing-more-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"IQ Scores Are Falling But, No, We\u2019re Not Growing More Stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Abstract Thinking (1932) by Mabel Dwight.
Courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, public domain<\/p><\/div>\n

Screens and social media get the blame, but the real problem lies in how we measure intelligence in the first place.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

5 Mar 2026\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0In the past decade, researchers have found data suggesting that, on average, the populations of developed Western countries are becoming more stupid. It\u2019s a reversal of the so-called Flynn Effect, named after the New Zealand philosopher and intelligence researcher James Flynn. In the 1980s, Flynn had shown<\/a> that, between the 1930s and the 1970s, average intelligence rose by three IQ points per decade in the United States and in other Western nations, a trend that seemed to persist until the 1990s. But then in the early years of the 21st century,<\/span> Flynn noticed something disturbing: IQ scores for even the brightest children in the US and the UK had started to decline<\/a>. And in Nordic nations, Flynn projected that average national intelligence scores \u2013 some of which had been declining since the mid-1990s \u2013 could drop by around seven IQ points over the following 30 years.<\/span><\/p>\n

Plenty of reasons are given for this decline. In November 2025, Lane Brown, a feature writer for New York<\/em> magazine, cited several possible factors: outsourcing our cognitive labour to AIs, being glued to our screens, the ongoing effects of COVID-19<\/span> and, though this is probably a niche factor, too-strong weed. \u2018The world is dumber, and we all know it,\u2019 writes Brown. \u2018Lately, it feels like that culturewide upgrade to our mental operating systems has been rolled back to an older and buggier version.\u2019<\/p>\n

The negative Flynn Effect, however, isn\u2019t what it seems. Firstly, falling average<\/em> intelligence among Western nations is perfectly compatible with rising intelligence rates among certain sections of their populations. But more worryingly, the IQ tests on which Flynn relies are of doubtful value<\/a>. Our stupidity, it turns out, is not always easy to understand.<\/small><\/p>\n

A <\/span>century ago, the superbly named pioneer of intelligence tests, Professor Edwin G Boring, remarked that \u2018Intelligence is what the tests test.\u2019 It\u2019s a maxim whose circularity suggests that aptitude at passing IQ tests may be a hopeless proxy for intelligence and doesn\u2019t indicate much about real-life cognitive abilities. Instead, IQ scores reward what society regards as valuable mental traits at a particular slice of time: your IQ number is a judgment rather than an objective fact. And yet, that number may serve as a curse or a badge of honour, depending on which side of the average 100-point score a person falls. As Brown puts it, \u2018both the original Flynn effect and its reversal might owe more to inconsistent methodology than to real cognitive change.\u2019<\/p>\n

IQ tests can also be unhelpfully culturally specific<\/a>, with disastrous, even racist results. In the BBC documentary Subnormal<\/em> (2021), one of the UK\u2019s first Black educational psychologists, Waveney Bushell, told an interviewer that underperforming Black kids who were segregated into special educational needs schools were often considered to be educationally subnormal due to unhelpful culturally specific questions on IQ papers. For instance, one question invited children to identify a \u2018tap\u2019 \u2013 more commonly known as a \u2018faucet\u2019 in the US. Easy enough, one would have thought. But some Black kids struggled with the question. It was not because they were stupid, but because in parts of the Caribbean, where their families are from, the word \u2018pipe\u2019 is used rather than \u2018tap\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

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For Arendt, our leading moral task is to overcome that stupidity \u2013 that form of moral blindness.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps there\u2019s more to intelligence than passing an IQ test. Consider the case of what Newsweek<\/em>, in a 1945 article, called \u2018the evil geniuses\u2019. Before high-ranking Nazis were tried at Nuremberg, American psychologists measured their IQ scores and, worryingly, found that, by that metric, many of the most evil men in the world were geniuses: the economics minister Hjalmar Schacht scored 143, the Air Force commander Hermann G\u00f6ring 138, and Hitler\u2019s architect Albert Speer 128.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1961, when the philosopher Hannah Arendt<\/a> looked across a Jerusalem courtroom into the eyes of Adolf Eichmann, one of the leading organisers of the Holocaust, she was struck by his absolute inability \u2018to think from the standpoint of somebody else\u2019. That is precisely what Arendt meant by the \u2018banality of evil<\/a>\u2019. Then in an interview in 1964, Arendt said: \u2018It was his thickheadedness that was so outrageous, as if speaking to a brick wall. And that was what I actually meant by banality \u2026 There\u2019s simply resistance ever to imagine what another person is experiencing.\u2019 For Arendt, our leading moral task is to overcome that stupidity \u2013 that form of moral blindness.<\/p>\n

S<\/span>o, even if our intelligence measures really are flawed, what explains the rise and fall of IQ scores? Flynn hypothesised the importance of environmental factors, including changes in education, nutrition, family structure, economic pressures, microplastics, antidepressants and woodfire smoke. But that\u2019s not an adequate explanation: from the 1930s, when average national intelligence rose in developed Western nations decade on decade, other deleterious environmental factors were at play. There was a lack of free public education and socialised healthcare, and toxic air pollution \u2013 a known factor influencing intelligence scores and cognition \u2013 was often unchecked. Complicating things further, what Flynn proposed as negative factors may be positive ones, and vice versa. Antidepressants, for instance, might help with improving one\u2019s intelligence precisely by lifting one out of existential hopelessness.<\/p>\n

More recently, observers have suggested two knockdown factors accounting for the apparent declines in average national intelligences: screens and social media. For many, these are intuitively seen as accelerants to the 21st century\u2019s<\/span> bonfire of stupidity \u2013 we seem to collectively sense that they are dumbing us down.<\/p>\n

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Intuitively, the argument that digital media is dumbing us down is plausible.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

On this point, it\u2019s worth noting that the scores used to support the negative Flynn Effect weren\u2019t down in every category. In 2023, researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Oregon published a study<\/a> indicating that average American intelligence declined between 2006 and 2018 across three of four broad domains tested. They found that their fellow citizens tracked falling scores in logic, vocabulary, visual and mathematical problem-solving, and analogical reasoning. Only scores for spatial ability \u00ad\u2013 the measure of the mind\u2019s ability to analyse three-dimensional objects \u2013 rose during that period for the average American. Again, this highlights the culturally specific value judgment of those who contend that IQ tests demonstrate falling average intelligence. Perhaps spatial ability, for instance, is more important to today\u2019s cognitive elites than reading. Certainly, you\u2019ll need the former if you\u2019re going to be any good at fast, visually intensive online games such as Fortnite. It is uncertain right now whether the gaming virtuosos who will play the next iteration of the Grand Theft Auto series will be dumber than someone who can write a plausible essay on the depiction of female autonomy in Samuel Richardson\u2019s literary classic Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady <\/em>(1748). Perhaps both skills are signs of intelligence; perhaps neither. What\u2019s important here is that it\u2019s hard to determine whether the latter is a more objective measure of intelligence than the former.<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n

Intuitively, the argument that digital media is dumbing us down is plausible. And book after book, based on study after study, appears to confirm our intuitions. Computers and smartphones spare us cognitive labour. As a result, the human mind has less to do. Therefore, the need to be intelligent is less of an evolutionary imperative than it was in the pre-digital era. Computers and smartphones are more complex than ever, but human routines are oddly simpler. Generations ago, dishwashers and clothes dryers eased physical labours in daily life. Today, an iPhone or an Amazon Echo can ease mental labour, enabling us, the creators of these machines, to slide into the warm bath of mental fatuity. But perhaps, in principle at least, using an Echo or talking with ChatGPT allows you to free your mind for more cognitively challenging work.<\/p>\n

The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan saw the invention of the light bulb as an enlightening moment for humanity. \u2018A light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence,\u2019 he wrote in Understanding Media<\/em> (1964) \u2013 the light extends human powers over what was hitherto dark. It is not utter folly to believe that AI and other digital tools derided for making us more stupid work in similar ways, by extending human cognitive powers rather than destroying them. Or maybe, and this is my favourite thought, they do one or the other depending on your ability to critically reflect on what the technology is offering you. ChatGPT, after all, does come with a cognitive health warning that the data it supplies may be wrong. It is up to the wit and discernment of the human using it to sort the right from the wrong. Human intelligence is not quite obsolete, but it does face new demands.<\/p>\n

O<\/span>ne intriguing hypothesis for the supposed cognitive decline has been advanced by the psychologist Elizabeth Dworak, lead author of the aforementioned 2023 study seeking to explain the negative Flynn Effect. As she told The Hill<\/em> newspaper: \u2018The line can\u2019t go up forever. It\u2019s called the ceiling effect. You eventually hit that threshold.\u2019 Again, this is intuitively plausible. What goes up must come down. Athletes can only run so quickly. Presumably, then, there will come a day when some sprinter holds on to the 100-metre world record, in principle, forever. Similarly, there\u2019s only so far mere human intelligence can go.<\/span><\/p>\n

But the parallel isn\u2019t a good one. Firstly, world records are measured objectively by clocks. Second, human intelligence is too slippery and culturally relative to yield to objective measurement. What we regard as intelligent or stupid changes over time, just like the skills that we regard as important or irrelevant. Some abilities valorised by IQ tests decades ago may be worthless in 2026.<\/p>\n

The grand delusion of IQ scores is that they are objective facts rather than relative measures of intelligence. Despite what hypotheses about the negative Flynn Effect suggest, these numbers do not offer incontrovertible evidence that us poor mugs in the developed West are more stupid on average than our grandparents. That judgment may say more about our witlessness than our intelligence. Or, at least, I hope I\u2019m not stupid in believing so.<\/span><\/p>\n

____________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Stuart Jeffries\u00a0<\/a><\/em>is a British journalist and author. His work has appeared in <\/em>The Guardian, The Spectator, the<\/em> Financial Times, and the<\/em> London Review of Books, among others. He is the author of <\/em>Mrs Slocombe\u2019s Pussy(2000), <\/em>Grand Hotel Abyss (2016), <\/em>Everything, All the Time, Everywhere<\/a> (2021) and <\/em>A Short History of Stupidity (2025).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – psyche.co<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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