In a mailing list that I’m on, one person posted:
> I’d note that the globe only actually shows the Amercias (and
> Canada) which in case you didn’t know America is the only country
> on the planet where the IQ is activly dropping.
She’s British, and quite proud of her country. But…
is she right? Are the people of Afghanistan,
Laos, and sub-Saharan Africa seeing their IQ’s rise
while those of the US fall?
Why don’t you ask her for a source?
BTW, is that a direct quote from your correspondent?
I think the real problem is that IQ’s aren’t generally measured. They test kids who they think are bright, and they test kids who they think are possibly disabled, but an average person has a good chance of going through life without ever taking an IQ test. So how good any statistical analysis of the numbers be meaningful?
You also have to consider standardized testing. These “measures of intelligence” that are used far more often than IQ tests vary greatly by state… even more by country. The populace tested also varies by country. It’s not a level playing field by design, and there is absolutely no way to make a blanket statement that one country is smarter than another.
This might possibly be true in the sense that, however this metric is being generated, they may be measuring a much larger and more representative slice of the population than in years past. As a general assertion about real average “IQ”, however, I would tend to reject it as a valid observation.
Purely as a personal, empirical observation I look at what both my children in public schools (elem and high school) are required to know and the amount and type of homework they are required to do etc. etc. and despite assertions to the contrary I just don’t see it reflected in lowered academic standards or expectations.
Well, you can always say that half the American populace has below average IQ 
Well, actually you can’t, necessarily.
Ask her for a cite. A reputable academic cite ;). She’s referring to the Flynn Effect which is a worldwide phenomenon, not just the US. This site has some info about how different countries seem to have different gains but it isn’t as clear cut as saying the US lost IQ points.
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/flynneffect.html
This site http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/FLYNNEFF.html says that the US is gaining, not losing.
Actually IQ tests are normed on large populations and do a reasonable job of measuring in the middle of the bell curve. They are most ineffective at measuring at the extremes of IQ. Because there are so few people who test at these levels, the companies who develop IQ tests don’t include them.
Ack! That sentence ‘don’t include them’ isn’t quite what I meant. What I was trying to say was that IQ tests don’t measure accurately at the extremes because it is hard to find a population at the extremes to norm on. It’s easy to find people who test between 90 and 140, harder to find people who test over 140 and becomes very difficult to find a large enough test population who test over 180.
Does anyone else find it ironic that a British woman with sloppy grammar is claiming Americans are dumbing down?
This is one of my favorite statistics. I am also waiting for my chance to tell someone that I have an above average number of legs. Either way, Tretiak or I missed a joke / sarcasm somewhere in there. Or I am missing something?
As to the OP, I don’t believe anyone has developed a reliable, comprehensive, accurate IQ test. Even if we take the latest versions of the tests as a standard, how can someone compare results over time? Especially if the test has been evolving for a bit, two generations of test takers are not taking the same test, so their respective scores can’t be compared. You also have the problem of comparing test results across cultural boundaries. I think this woman needs to lay off the lead paint.
Tests such as the Stanford Binet are normed in the countries where they will be used so cultural differences are evened out. There’s a new SB being developed at the moment - it will be slightly different for each country after it is tested in each country. Tests are renormed which is to bring them closer to what they were in the beginning, not to make them different.
I don’t think we do have completely reliable and accurate IQ tests which give a completely accurate and reliable result for every person tested.
Kind of ironic, I guess in a thread about IQ, but…
the median represents the point where half are above and half are bleow, not the average. For example, suppose you have 5 people with IQ’s 50, 100, 150, 200, 225. The average IQ is 145, but less then half have below average IQs.
Ah, competing definitions of ‘average’. I was under the impression that in general, tests are scaled so that 100 = average, putting 100 right at the center of the bell curve. In a land full of Hawkins and Einsteins (would they live in an Eigenstate?) 100 would still be average, and the folk’s scores would spread out from there. Of course, since I am a male and therefore carry the defective Simpson gene, I don’t think I’ve ever come close to an IQ test in real life.
Rhythmdvl is right. 100 is an average IQ. If scores on a particular IQ test start to drift higher, then the test is renormed so that 100 remains the average IQ. So if you have a population who test at 140 on an outmoded IQ test, then the 140 is renormed to 100 when the scatter on the bell curve is adjusted for.
Average, in the common sense of the word, means an arithmetic mean. This is the one most people are familiar with. Add all the elements together and divide by the number of elements. It is entirely possible that more than half of the elements are above or below the average.
For example: 10, 11, 12, 13, 50. The arithmetic mean is 19.2 Therefore, fully 80% of this set is “below average.”
The word average can, in a broader sense, mean any of a number of statistics used to describe the nature of a population: median, midrange, mode, etc. A median is the statistic which lies in the center of all the values, leaving exactly half of the elements above the median, and half below. (Unless there’s an odd number of elements, in which case one element will be neither above nor below, or there are many elements with the same value as the median. But the general principle holds.)
Ahem, now back to your regularly scheduled thread.
Of course, one might want to define intelligence first. Too often, (hidden) cultural components confound a comparison.
The average I.Q. is rising in every country in the world with a sufficiently long history of I.Q. testing to allow us to look at several decades of general I.Q. testing. This was first noticed by James R. Flynn in the early '80’s and has been checked by other researchers on populations in many countries. The average rise is about 3 points per decade, although it’s slightly higher in some countries and slightly lower in others.
No one really understands why the Flynn effect is true. If you want to send this thread over to Great Debates we can discuss the various suggested causes for the Flynn effect and why each of theses suggested causes isn’t really strong enough to account for it. For that matter, if we want this thread to go to Great Debates, we can discuss whether I.Q. even exists as a clearly definable quantity.
Before Flynn published his work in 1984, there were two schools of thought on whether there was any average change in I.Q. The first, among most psychologists, was there couldn’t be any change in average I.Q. The quantity measured by I.Q., according to these people, was something that was completely genetic, and since people hadn’t been mutating fast enough for something like I.Q. to change significantly, of course there was no change. The second, among the sort of whiny people who claim that kids today are no damn good, was that obviously kids are stupider than their elders.
Flynn wasn’t even looking at changes in I.Q.'s when he discovered the Flynn effect. For that matter, he isn’t even a psychologist, but a political scientist, and he was looking at I.Q. scores to test some other hypothesis. It wasn’t easy to notice the change in average I.Q. scores (which is why it took to long for this phenomenon to be discovered), since I.Q. tests are usually completely rewritten and renormed every 10 or 20 years. When you renorm a test, you give it to a population and declare the average score, by definition, to be a 100 I.Q. To test the Flynn effect, you need to find I.Q. tests that have been in use for at least a decade and look at the average scores on the tests at the beginning of the test’s use and at the end.
What Flynn found and what other researchers have since confirmed is that, whatever I.Q. tests are measuring, it’s rising in every country with a long history of I.Q. testing. Some people, including Flynn, think that this means that I.Q. isn’t measuring anything useful.