James R. Flynn, who found we are getting smarter, dies at 86
In 1978, James R. Flynn, a political philosopher at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, was writing a book about what constituted a “humane” society. He considered “inhumane” societies as well dictatorships, apartheid states and, in his reading, came across the work of Arthur R. Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley.
Jensen was best known for an article he published in 1969 claiming that the differences between Black and white Americans on IQ tests resulted from genetic differences between the races and that programs that tried to improve Black educational outcomes, like Head Start, were bound to fail.
Flynn, a committed leftist who had once been a civil rights organizer in Kentucky, felt instinctively that Jensen was wrong, and he set out to prove it. In 1980 he published a thorough, devastating critique of Jensen’s work showing, for example, that many groups of whites scored as low as Black Americans. But he didn’t stop there.
Like most researchers in his field, Jensen had assumed that intelligence was constant across generations, pointing to the relative stability of IQ tests over time as evidence. But Flynn noticed something that no one else had: Those tests were recalibrated every decade or so. When he looked at the raw, uncalibrated data over nearly 100 years, he found that IQ scores had gone up, dramatically.
“If you scored people 100 years ago against our norms, they would score a 70,” or borderline mentally disabled, he said later. “If you scored us against their norms, we would score 130” borderline gifted.
Just as groundbreaking was his explanation for why. The rise was too fast to be genetic, nor could it be that our recent ancestors were less intelligent than we are. Rather, he argued, the last century has seen a revolution in abstract thinking, what he called “scientific spectacles,” brought on by the demands of a technologically robust industrial society. This new order, he maintained, required greater educational attainment and an ability to think in terms of symbols, analogies and complex logic exactly what many IQ tests measure.
“He surprised everyone, despite the fact that the field of intelligence research is intensely data centric,” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker said in an interview. “This philosopher discovered a major phenomenon that everyone had missed.”
Though Flynn published his research in 1984, it was not until a decade later that it drew attention outside the narrow world of intelligence researchers. The turning point came with the publication in 1994 of “The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life,” by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray, in which they argued that genes play a dominant role in shaping intelligence, a position that its fiercest critics called racist. In reviewing arguments for and against their position, the authors outlined Flynn’s research and even gave it a name: the Flynn effect.
A buzzword was born. The Flynn effect became shorthand for an optimistic view of the human condition and made Flynn something of a pop-culture hero, an image underscored by his lanky build, rumpled outfits and Einsteinian mess of curly white hair. A 2013 TED Talk in which he explains “why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents’” has been viewed 4.4 million times.
Flynn died at 86 on Dec. 11 at an assisted living center in Dunedin, New Zealand. The cause was intestinal cancer, said his son, Victor Flynn, a math professor at Oxford.
In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Emily (Malkin) Flynn, a divorce lawyer, and his daughter, Natalie Flynn, a clinical psychologist.
James Robert Flynn was born on April 28, 1934, in Washington. His father, Joseph Flynn, was a journalist, and his mother, Mae Flynn, was a homemaker.
Raised a Roman Catholic, Flynn renounced religion when he was 12. As a scholarship student at the University of Chicago, he had originally planned to study mathematics or physics, but he was nagged by the question of how morality functions without faith.