On the Reverse Flynn Effect

Last fall, a Norwegian psychology professor named Lars Dehli was asked to give a lecture on intelligence. It had been a while since he had taught the topic, so he looked forward to revisiting it. As he explained in ​an essay​ about the experience, he decided to start the lecture by discussing the so-called Flynn Effect—the well-known phenomenon, first observed by James Flynn, whereby measured IQ scores have been steadily increasing since World War II. “It’s always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who have ever lived,” Dehli wrote.

But as he gathered data to build an up-to-date chart, he was “very surprised” by what he discovered: “IQ has actually started to fall.”

Dehli was not the first person to notice this decline. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have been documenting what has become known as the Reverse Flynn Effect. Consider, for example, ​a recent paper​ published in the journal Intelligence that studied IQ scores over time in an American population. It found a steady decline in almost every intelligence metric studied as part of a 35-item assessment.

Here’s a chart that shows these declines broken out by education level:

There’s no consensus on the causes of the Reverse Flynn Effect. But in a ​recent podcast appearance​, James Mariott, a critic and columnist for The Times of London, summarized a hypothesis that has been gaining traction: as we switch our information consumption from print to digital devices, our ability to think deeply degrades.

As Marriott explains:

“Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can’t just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube…print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging. If you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it’s not surprising that people are getting stupider…and that we seem to find that IQ is declining.”

The data on the Reverse Flynn Effect includes several pieces of evidence that support Marriott’s claims. The IQ reversal, for example, seems to begin right around 2010—the point at which smartphones began their rapid ascent to ubiquity. In addition, according to the Northwestern study, the demographic suffering the steepest declines is 18 to 22-year-olds, who also happen to be the heaviest users of smartphones.

As with most psychological findings, it is unlikely that we will ever fully attribute this effect to a single, specific cause. But based on common sense and lived experience, there’s certainly a ring of truth to this device hypothesis.

It’s grown standard to say things like, “my phone is making me so dumb!”, but this is often intended to be a figure of speech; a self-deprecating shorthand for the reality that the things we do on our phone are dumb, or that we spend less time doing “smart” activities than we used to. If these technological interpretations of the Reverse Flynn Effect hold up, it might turn out that this quip is way more literal than we may have originally assumed.

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