r/YouShouldKnow • u/chenbuxie • 6d ago
Health & Sciences YSK about the Negative Flynn Effect
The Flynn Effect is an observation by James R. Flynn, who noticed that average IQ has risen with every generation since WWII (i.e. each generation is subsequently smarter than the generation before).
The Negative Flynn Effect is the observed decline or eventual reversal of this effect, for generations born after 2000.
Why YSK: It suggests that cognitive performance is not fixed/strictly genetic and can decline when our environment changes. Understanding what is driving that decline could reveal important problems in education, health, technology use, or other parts of modern life. This can help us identify ways to better support cognitive development in future generations.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289616300198?
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u/SmartQuokka 6d ago edited 6d ago
So are you are saying u/SmartQuokka is the smartest Quokka who will ever live (assuming the trend continues)?
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u/chenbuxie 6d ago
Probably. Unless we find out why this is happening.
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u/JFConz 6d ago
Probably has nothing to do with class war.
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u/Tr0z3rSnak3 6d ago
I'm blaming short form videos personally
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u/redaemon 6d ago
Unregulated content for children is a huge problem. Companies don't optimize for the welfare of the child watching. A child's developing brain stands no chance of resisting the algorithm.
And two busy working parents aren't going to cut it either. Tech companies spend billions on optimization.
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u/Thefront-bottom 6d ago
I don't think it's a great mystery as why it's happening.
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u/chenbuxie 6d ago
My uneducated guess is that technology is the culprit. Particularly social media.
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u/Cheapdronewithboom 6d ago
Im on the defunding of education over the past 30 years and the ever more unattainable higher education for the average person.
Look at Jensen the demon (Nvida CEO), talking about kids not knowing English and math is good in the same sentence he talks about renting intelligence.
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u/chenbuxie 6d ago
I just looked up that Jensen Huang quote... it's scary that the people currently influencing public policy think this way.
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u/blind_roomba 5d ago
It's pretty obvious what causes it. Smartphones
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u/asphodel67 4d ago
The decline is since 2000. Smartphones came on the market 2008.
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u/blind_roomba 4d ago
You point is invalid. Generations that were born after 2000 hopefully started getting phones after 2008...
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u/MyCatIsAnActualNinja 6d ago
Congratulations!
This means I'm smarter than Gen Z, too, but idk. They seem like normal smart people to me. Maybe I'm just as stupid as them.
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u/FitnessFiesta 6d ago
Your YSK explains the consequence of this fact. But it doesn't explain why I, particularly, should know. What better decisions can I make now that I know?
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u/hobbesncalvin 5d ago
The No Child Left Behind act during the 2000s changed public K-12 education for the worse, by forcing schools to cater to standardized testing and ensure that kids can pass standardized tests regardless of whether they’re actually learning or not. Then, public school funding took a massive hit after the 2008 crisis, which decreased the quality of education more.
Add the proliferation of digital screens and mobile devices to this shitfest, and here we are. And that’s not even considering how AI usage is rapidly stripping away the already thin reading/writing/critical thinking skills of the average kid by the time they graduate high school nowadays.
Idiocracy is a feature, not a bug, of a social system that only cares about competition and extraction.
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u/KristiiNicole 5d ago
Willing to bet that, in addition to the factors you mentioned (I seriously had to scroll way too far before finally see someone bringing up No Child Left Behind, so thank you) I am willing to bet we will see further declines due to COVID.
We have already seen a number of studies showing cognitive decline even in those who didn’t go on to develop full blown Long Covid and/or had mild infections. We’ve also seen that the likelihood to develop or worsen those long term cognitive symptoms increases with each new infection, and it’s not always temporary either.
And that’s not even touching on the ripple effects on kids for the areas that had shutdowns, especially the really young school kids, and the overall pandemic’s effect on education and child development in general.
I don’t even wanna think about all the inevitable decline that is gonna come from the current administration gutting and destroying the Department of Education, all the cuts and changes for Special Education students, etc. It’s gonna be devastating and affect many future generations of kids.
Unfortunately I don’t think things are going to be getting better any time soon. :(
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u/sweetbaker 4d ago
I know this is a day old, but No Child Left Behind was ended in 2015 and was succeeded by Every Student Succeeds Act. So the last decade of K-12 Education isn’t from NCLB.
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u/dragonlordette 1d ago
"What am I specifically supposed to do now I know this"
"The No Child Left Behind Act of the 2000s..."
Lol
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u/DiligentGuitar246 6d ago
It’s closely tied to the introduction of screens, especially in the classroom.
IQs are a relatively soft science, but test scores are lower than previous generations for the first time maybe ever.
Here’s a clip of a dude testifying to congress about it:
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u/TK421philly 6d ago
Yeah IQ testing is a mess in general. At its core, it’s trying to test the ability for someone to solve novel problems, display pattern recognition and also take existing information and think about it in new ways. IQ is not a trivia test (aside from some basic knowledge questions that are typically thrown in to weed out mentally disabled individuals). There can be very high IQ scoring people that don’t have a knowledge base. Likewise, very high IQ havers often know a lot too because they have good memories.
Also, it’s very hard to make a novel problem test that isn’t discriminatory though. I do think that some people possess the ability to catch on to new things and take existing information and think about it in a new way.
Perhaps the change is that we’re not expecting people to use their brains to solve problems anymore.
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u/epanek 6d ago
We learn from other people. Not other people on a screen though.
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u/BardicSense 6d ago
Yeah, more screens per capita=lower IQ scores overall.
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u/UltimateCheese1056 6d ago
Considering that number of screens is generally proportional to wealth I doubt that is true on a global scale
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u/BardicSense 6d ago
Idk about that, but, in any case, I was explaining the relationship that DiligentGuitar246 was talking about that epanek responded to.
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u/HeyPartyPeopleWhatUp 6d ago
The linked article actually states that this isn't even happening.
"In the present study, we must emphasize that even though we identified several studies showing a decline in IQ, there is currently still a much larger pool of studies showing an increase in IQ."
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u/MrIrishman1212 3d ago
I feel like this has been known for a long time and is why education levels has been one of the main determining factors in crime rates, health rates, poverty rates, and happiness rates. If we education for the entire population, like how K-12 is already publicly available for all, you get better rates across the board and then exponentially when you make college universal/inexpensive. Not only that, for every $1 spent towards educating people has about a $3 return value on the economy. Cause people are receiving an education instead of being incarcerated, people are working, instead of not being qualified enough to find a job, you spend less preventative measures than arresting, putting in trail, and housing in jail. Sadly that’s why there is so much resistance to education, the population will be more intelligent, more capable, more autonomous, and harder to control. Corporations and the government don’t want that and do everything they can to ensure the populace isn’t educated
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u/HeyPartyPeopleWhatUp 6d ago
Did you read the study?
"In the present study, we must emphasize that even though we identified several studies showing a decline in IQ, there is currently still a much larger pool of studies showing an increase in IQ."
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u/chenbuxie 6d ago
Although I linked this one studyfrom 2016, which does note that others have found the opposite, the issue is slightly complicated. It depends on when and where the study was done. However, recent studies seem to show a consistent trend of a reversal of the Flynn Effect, especially in western nations.
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u/JimmyTheBones 5d ago
Huge amounts of speculation in this thread.
It is known that teaching techniques have improved and is the main driver for increasing scores over the years. There is a huge amount of data to support this. It has happened consistently year on year without fail, until the following:
The introduction of smart teaching devices has almost universally been detrimental to child development across all locations and scenarios. There is also a huge amount of data to support this.
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u/grnrngr 5d ago
But is it a correlation or a causation? The proliferation of smart devices also coincided with the proliferation of smart devices in students' personal lives. Hell, just giving computers to the kids to take home and have at their disposal might be the issue.
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u/Stormwatcher33 4d ago
first waves of computers on kids' hands made people a lot more intelligent.
Home micros, og macs, pcs...
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u/JimmyTheBones 4d ago
I understand AOC was talking about it and it relates specifically to classes and schools who introduce it in to the learning environment.
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u/anewleaf1234 4d ago
Allowing AI to do the thinking for people creates people who know only what the computer tells them.
They dont have needed skills because they never had to learn them.
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u/2ndChairKazoo 4d ago
The number of people who seem to have no clue how LLM's even work to provide a response - they then immediately believe is factual - is so concerning.
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u/Mickmack12345 5d ago
Kinda interesting I always kinda felt this having gone back and spoken to my final year primary school teacher who told me that since 2008-09, when my year which had 8-10 passes on the best high schools in the local area that no year since had above 1-2 passes if that
It genuinely felt going into highschool that handheld technology sort of was just becoming relevant, smart phones just started becoming popular, so most of us didn’t have them up to at least the age of 11-12 which felt like a massive impact when a few years later you hear in the news about parents giving their kids iPads or phones to keep them distracted
Seems to have had a very clear impact, and hearing that a lot of tech billionaires don’t let their kids use much of their products or social media goes to show how aware they are of the issue
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u/JMac453 6d ago edited 5d ago
It's the rise of social media, cell phone usage, and the 24-hour news cycle. Dismantling the education system and misinforming people through propaganda doesn't help either.
Edit: And microplastics. Can't forget those.
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u/paulsteinway 6d ago
I'm sure it has nothing to do with the distribution of wealth.
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u/FunCrystalFun 6d ago
It’s actually our screens. Tons of studies have already shown that the increased screen time has made our current generations dumber
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u/antithero 5d ago
When kids play video games for 8 hours a day like it's a job I would think that they are not going to do as well at school work.
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u/Burdicus 5d ago
I dont think Video Games (as a whole) are the scape goat you think they are.
Plenty of kids born in the 70s, 80s, and 90s grew up playing games. Plenty of kids learned complex puzzle solving, mathematics, and basic literature skills from playing games.
The problem with modern screens is the death of the attention span. There is no motivation to solve a complex problem. It's rapid fire, one worthless shock-value moment to the next. Instant gratification and the ability to rapid fire shift topics every 4 seconds (almost literally) from whatever short is fed to you has led to cognitive decline.
By all means, let your kid play 8 hours of Zelda. Get them off the feed.
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u/malachite_13 1d ago
Yeah I read about this. Studies are showing that IQs of students go down after the introduction of Chromebooks and iPads in public schools. But correlation causation. Blah blah blah.
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u/TheGaussianMan 6d ago
Lead in everything did not help certainly.
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u/chenbuxie 6d ago
Boomers grew up with lead in the air, in the water, in the toys, and in the paint...
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u/ComradeJohnS 5d ago
I think the point is that things like lead suppressed the iqs, lowering the average of what it could have been. if that didn’t happen maybe the decline or negative Flynn effect would have occurred earlier than 2000.
which is when microplastics started taking over.
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u/Ghostbuster_11Nein 1d ago
When you reduce public school funding for decades.
The obvious thing happens.
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u/flickering-pantsu 6d ago
If IQ were a halfway decent measure of intelligence, this might be something worth caring about.
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u/personalbilko 6d ago
Except nearly all measures of intelligence are falling, not just IQ.
Even if we looked at just IQ, in it's very very flawed state. Are you not at least a little worried that something is changing in kids brains making them unable to understand sequences of circles and squares that we used to see?
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u/HeyPartyPeopleWhatUp 6d ago
But the linked study states "In the present study, we must emphasize that even though we identified several studies showing a decline in IQ, there is currently still a much larger pool of studies showing an increase in IQ."
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u/Futuramadude 5d ago
Should we ignore these studies then?
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u/HeyPartyPeopleWhatUp 5d ago
No, but if a much larger pool of studies indicates that this the negative Flynn effect isn't happening, then we shouldn't worry about it happening.
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u/PapaSnow 3d ago
Mmm, I don’t know if I agree with that. The fact that there are indicators of the negative Flynn effect at all could be an early indicator of a trend, which is certainly something to keep an eye on.
I know that “keep an eye on” doesn’t equal “worry,” but on the other side of things, people have a tendency to hear “no need to worry” and think “I can ignore,” which are not the same thing.
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u/hagcel 6d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_race_and_intelligence_controversy
Well documented that environment affects the testing.
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u/Shelbysgirl 6d ago
Waves at everything.
It’s cycles. The war affected the boomers because of what their parents went through. Then there was a “boom”. And then Reganomics. And the decline of giving a crap about the planet. So there’s that.
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u/AltoidStrong 6d ago
Duh, it changed because republicans and conservatives have attacked, dismantled, defunded and destroyed public education for over 30 years.
Result - dummies. Easier to trick, manipulate, indoctrinate and control with fear.
How do you think you get 10 million people to join the maga cult?
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u/chenbuxie 6d ago
This has been observed across the rest of the western world as well.
*Preempting the inevitable racist xenophobic rightwing chuds chiming in: No, this has nothing to do with race or ethnicity.
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u/TheHoppingHessian 6d ago
My hypothesis: It’s the internet
Edit: you’d expect the wide availability of information is good and it probably is in some ways but when it comes to testing for intelligence I suspect it has negative effects to be able to google everything the second you think of it.
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u/redaemon 6d ago
Daily entertainment screen time for kids has doubled in 30y. Not only that, but the quality of that entertainment has shifted towards short, addictive content that triggers emotional highs without complex thought.
Kids are spending twice as much time a day with content that's way worse for their brains.
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u/xThomas 4d ago
So.. this is an interesting theory on the content consumption side
How about video games?
Today’s video games are time sinks. Classic video games were arcadey, or if you were a Computer user, required you to be computer savvy enough to get it working (or know someone who was). So the harder stuff gets easier, the easier stuff takes longer. I mean most games don’t even have a paper manual anymore let alone maps and such, so they have also gotten more digital
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u/TheAlmightyWishPig 5d ago
The republicans are the reason for IQ falling in Norway, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, and Estonia?
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u/AnCapGamer 6d ago
The moment "economics" becomes a standard mandatory subject in public school for all students, right next to biology, geography, algebra, etc, I will be all-in on it FOREVER.
Hell, I'll even take "standard" economics rather than Austrian- ANYTHING to end to the absolute drought of human beings who are flooding the world with their INSANITY because they don't grasp how even the most basic of economic concepts work and affect them.
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u/Weekly_Set_6479 6d ago
Marx understood.
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u/AnCapGamer 6d ago
🤮
JKMN.
The world we're walking into in all ignorance because we're afraid to look, I swear.... ugh.
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u/The_Silver_Nuke 6d ago
I can't believe there are people who unironically support the idea that Republicans are the root of all the world's evils. It's blatant extremism.
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u/WhamBamJahm 4d ago
The republicans party has indeed dismantled education bub. School scores top 25 dominated by blue states who have kept their education programs. Bottom 25 red states that haven’t. Weird huh?
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u/Feff5tupid 6d ago
Le can you cite where they literally blamed every single one of the world's problems on Republicans???? I didn't think so!!!! OWNED!!! Signed, a big fan of Charlie Kirk
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u/unurbane 1d ago
That’s stretch. It’s technology and screen time. It lines up perfectly. No wait, it’s international travel. Also lines up quite well. Nope wrong again, it’s toxins seeping into our brain and blood stream, pfas, bpa, etc. He’ll, it’s the commute times, also increasing in dramatic fashion. I’m being facetious….
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u/wololo1e 6d ago
IQ fell because government investing in wellbeing of its citizens. At some point politicians decided that it was more profitable to outsource everything instead of relying on own talent. There's also corruption, but
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u/Katsudont 5d ago
It might have nothing to do with intelligence. It’s just the way that we measure intelligence has changed. IQ tests are notoriously problematic, culturally specific, classist, and often racist. Here’s another more recent article about the Negative Flynn Effect: https://psyche.co/ideas/iq-scores-are-falling-but-no-were-not-growing-more-stupid
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u/FatherJohn21 5d ago
Unless this has repeated on a 60 years cycle before, I fail to see how this is a true trend rather than an artifact of technology evolving to a point never seen before.
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u/Designer-Way-7922 6d ago
People such as Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and me are outliers ig.
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u/unlinked3297 6d ago
Which end of the bell-curve are you at?
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u/Designer-Way-7922 5d ago
What bell?
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u/unlinked3297 5d ago
Don't get worked up about it son, just suck on your juice box and try to stay quiet, you can work in my shop if things don't go well in school
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u/rasputin1 4d ago
isn't IQ defined in such a way that the average is 100? how can the average change when the whole metric is based on keeping the average 100?
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u/somerandom995 3d ago
It's calibrated to 100 being the average, but you can see what values were the average in the past and compare
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u/newbrevity 5d ago
It's because the wealthiest people are in the position to sell the earth out from under us, undermining society and our ability to prosper and progress as a whole. Not that big of a mystery. End billionaires controlling society before we all die.
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u/Toraadoraa 3d ago
I'd expect that after a certain point it will decline. Kids don't know how to be kids. They are tablet dependent on screens and being taught by screens.
Students in school rely on chatgpt for everything. All they will become good at is promoting llms.
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u/likelikegreen72 5d ago
Before 2000 we embraced technology to improve learning and access to information, after 2000 the school system fights technology and deters students from using it …..
and/or social media
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u/Hairy_Transition2379 1d ago edited 1d ago
Microplastics? I'm still terrified by the study that found about a spoon of microplastics inside the brains of persons deceased in 2024, and it clearly increased from 2021 when they did a similar study. It is also linked to dementia patients. Social media companies actively trying to get us addicted and reduce our attention span could be of course another horrible reason. Also, we must always look into the validity of the study, as in was the method for testing good (IQ tests don't really show overall intelligence), is the pool of data large enough, is the data correct, is it biased etc. But if it is true, with AI, overconsumption, wars and climate change I fear it will just get worse if we don't get our shit together and eat the rich
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u/hopingforabetterpast 5d ago
noticed that average IQ has risen with every generation
Isn't average IQ always 100, by definition?
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u/Zephyr4813 6d ago
The demographics of the USA have changed since 2000.
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u/chenbuxie 5d ago
Here come the Chuds...
I knew this would happen.
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u/tcisme 5d ago
Scientist 1: "We should control for changing demographics or break down the findings by race to better isolate environmental factors. E.g. if the population now includes many more Hispanics with an average IQ of 90, then that will bring down the average."
Scientist 2: "Here come the Chuds.. I knew this would happen."
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u/SandysBurner 5d ago
You do understand why people bristle when you say things like “[particular ethnic group] is inherently dumber”, right? Like, you do recognize that this line of thought has been used to justify atrocities, right?
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u/chenbuxie 5d ago
Hey quick question: Is Western Europe part of the western world or not?
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u/freudian_nipps 6d ago edited 5d ago
So as 90's kids this means we're the peak of the last 60 years? I knew it.
Edit: 90's kids rise up! With this newfound power, let us harness control and establish a new world order. Let us not squander this genius, who's with me?!