The Flynn Effect, this 'rising-curve' phenomenon is James Flynn's explanation of the rise in mean IQ scores during the 20th century (Rowe & Rodgers, 2002). He and his colleagues were the first to notice this rise and it is now fairly accepted that there is one. The phenomenon was first observed in New Zealand in the 1980’s, that different generations of people seemed to be scoring increasingly higher results in standard intelligence tests. It has been shown and is universally accepted that word knowledge has risen significantly in the last 20 years by about 5 verbal IQ points (Nettelbeck & Wilson, 2004).
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| ''Ah, I see! So the line going up means more smarteredness'' |
''If the present generation is put at 100, their grandparents had a mean IQ of 82.36. Either today's children are so bright that they should run circles around us, or their grandparents were so dull that it is surprising that they could keep a modern society ticking over'' (Flynn).
One could argue that the Flynn Effect is not down to biological factors but more so environmental factors (Nijenhuis, 2011), such as the advances in technology and education, e.g. that technology aids the transmission of information to all corners of the globe. Better nutrition and more education possibilities may have resulted in IQ improvements for each generation (APA).
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We're living in an era of smart phones and stupid people
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