Are You Dumber Than Your Dad?

It seems the succession plan has hit a snag.

According to a growing body of research, today’s younger generations aren’t performing as well on IQ tests as the generations before them. Not by a mile, but enough to make researchers stop and ask, Wait...what’s going on here?

I have to admit, there’s a tiny part of me that’s jealous of anyone who has an effect, law, or library named after them. I don’t need a Nobel Prize. I’d settle for Andrea’s Principle: “If you put something away for safe keeping, you’ll never find it again.”

In the 1980s, political scientist James Flynn documented something fascinating. For most of the twentieth century, IQ scores kept rising. Not dramatically, but steadily—roughly three points every decade.

To his credit, Flynn didn’t name the phenomenon after himself. The authors of The Bell Curve did. Flynn wanted it be named after another researcher named Tuddenham, but let’s be honest...the Tuddenham Effect sounds like a British stool softener.

Researchers figured this out because each new generation was periodically given earlier versions of IQ tests. Over and over, the newer groups outperformed the previous ones, especially on questions involving abstract reasoning, pattern recognition, and problem-solving. (Memorization? Not so much.)

The trend held across dozens of countries, not just America—where, if social media is any indication, we seem to be surrendering brain cells by the hour. I said what I said.

Scientists have spent decades debating why we kept getting “smarter.” Better childhood nutrition. More education. Better healthcare. Smaller families, meaning more parental attention. (As a Gen Xer who was basically feral, I’m skeptical of that one.)

Technology probably played a role too. Life simply became more mentally demanding.

Until...

Someone hit the brakes.

Beginning in the 1990s, researchers noticed the gains slowing in countries like Norway, Denmark, Finland, the UK, and eventually the United States.

Then they stopped entirely.

Now, in many places, they’re reversing.

Naturally, scientists call this...the Reverse Flynn Effect (which feels about as creative as naming a sequel The Original Movie, But More of It).

No one knows exactly why it’s happening. Some researchers blame less reading and more passive screen time. Others point to changes in education, demographics, or environmental factors. It’s also possible we’ve simply squeezed as much as we can out of the factors that made previous generations score higher.

Or maybe...

Maybe we’re outsourcing the very mental skills those tests were designed to measure.

This seems plausible to me. I haven’t done long division since Dubya was in office. It’s not that I can’t: it’s that I have faster, more accurate tools within arm’s reach. The calculators (and phones) haven’t made me incapable. They’ve made me lazy… efficient.

I’ve never been a fan of standardized tests. Especially the new adaptive electronic SAT, which changes the complexity of the questions based on your performance in the previous section. (That is a ranting essay for a different day.)

But maybe the bigger question isn’t whether people are getting “dumber”.

Maybe it’s whether IQ tests are measuring the kinds of intelligence that matter today.

Was Gen X really smarter than the Greatest Generation?

Or were we simply better at the kinds of puzzles psychologists happened to care about?

I think about my grandmother all the time.

She lived in Manhattan when horse-drawn carriages still clip-clopped down the cobblestone streets and gaslights were lit by hand. There is absolutely no chance she’d have figured out how to host a Zoom meeting. But she spoke three languages, knew shorthand, and kept the books for her business without software reminding her to save her work every thirty seconds. During the sugar rationing of the war years, she somehow managed to bribe people into keeping her candy store stocked.

How can you compare that kind of intelligence against knowing how to calculate the volume of a cylinder?

Still… I admit the generational differences can be alarming.

When my daughter’s 14-year old friend asked me what a vegetable was, I wept for our future. She can tell me every brand run by a Kardashian, explain six TikTok trends, and recap the relationship status of four casts of Love Island. But, when I asked if the chocolate bunny was hollow, I was met with, “What does hollow mean again?” (I swear, this is 100% truth.)

Maybe every generation loses one set of skills and gains another.

Maybe today’s kids are developing kinds of intelligence we don’t yet know how to measure.

Or maybe we’re handing over so many mental tasks to our devices that our brains have set sail on a catamaran.

I don’t know.

But I do wonder if, one day, we’ll look up from the endless scroll, realize we’ve outsourced not just the nuisance tasks, but our higher-ordered thinking...and be too distracted to notice what we’ve lost.

xo

P.S. The more the years roll by, the more I think we’re destined to be the folks in Wall-e. If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a watch. (Yes, it’s animated and still realistic.)

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