Americans’ IQ scores are lower in some areas, higher in one

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/03/americans-iq-scores-are-lower-in-some-areas-higher-in-one/

by geox • 3 years ago

19 55 3 years ago

news.northwestern.edu

thih9• 3 years ago

To expand on the title:

verbal reasoning (logic, vocabulary), matrix reasoning (visual problem solving, analogies), and letter and number series (computational/mathematical) dropped during the study period
scores of 3D rotation (spatial reasoning) generally increased from 2011 to 2018

gleenn• 3 years ago

I wonder if any of this is related to Covid. Perhaps it afflicted parts of the brain differently. That doesn't explain why any parts would get better though.

ipaddr• 3 years ago

The period they are studying happens before covid

cookie_monsta• 3 years ago

scores of 3D rotation (spatial reasoning) generally increased from 2011 to 2018

Minecraft's full release date? November 2011. Just sayin'

adrr• 3 years ago

Video game penetration went up significantly during this time period. It's probably all video games and not specific to just one.

https://www.marketingcharts.com/cross-media-and-traditional/...

speed_spread2• 3 years ago

We had Lego long before that.

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

Are IQ tests ever useful for determining something in the real world, something that impacts us?

Interviewing for a Swedish fintech, they had me do an online IQ test in front of a webcam proctor before they would send me the take home assignment. I passed the IQ test with max score but didn't get the job.

What was the point of the IQ test? Why not just send people the take home assignment directly? Surely if they can do the takehome they have a great IQ to begin with. Is the IQ test some Big-tech fetish? A fintech fetish? A Swedish hiring fetish?

The lengthy IQ test felt completely shoehorned in the recruiting process and was a massive waste of time, and told my friends to not bother applying for jobs there.

gotoeleven• 3 years ago

below a certain level they indicate that you are likely to question the validity of IQ in an internet comment

wizzwizz4• 3 years ago

I'd be surprised if there are any studies that show this.

Anecdotal evidence: me. Can reliably get high scores in IQ tests. Trained to pass IQ tests as a child. Regularly questions the validity of IQ in internet comments.

justizin• 3 years ago

IQ has racist and eugenicist origins, not understanding that in 2023 can only be described as willful ignorance.

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

Which level would that be? Considering I maxed the test.

mdp20219• 3 years ago

ever useful

Surely they reveal some traits. Issue is, they do not reveal other traits which are relevant to the whole "intention".

tester756• 3 years ago

Some say that IQ is the best predictor for work / academic success

anamexis• 3 years ago

[who?]

mdp20219• 3 years ago

Then Daniel Goleman arrived and popularized the notion of a number of other qualities as superior predictors

("Emotional Intelligence", "Focus"¹, grit...)

[¹Capitalized as they are also book titles]

tomjakubowski• 3 years ago

Very low IQ is predictive of poorer outcomes in wealth and income. That's about it. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...

treeman792• 3 years ago

My wife teaches kindergarten.

Children with problems almost always have much lower IQ. 50-70 for the most troublesome. There is a long process of testing to get them help / in a place where they are not injuring themselves, her, and or other students.

Not all, but many of the parents in complete denial about the reality of the situation.

dilyevsky• 3 years ago

It’s possible they actually wanted someone dumb so maybe the test worked as intended

alistairSH• 3 years ago

In the US, it's possible to be too smart to be a police officer. In Conn, an above average IQ is a disqualifier and that policy has been upheld in the courts.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/too-smart-to-be-a-cop/

silisili• 3 years ago

When I was younger, I was applying to be a beer delivery driver because honestly, it was pretty good money for where I lived.

They gave us something similar to an IQ test - some logic, some reasoning, some general knowledge.

Afterwards a guy called me into his office. Said nobody had ever aced this test before, and joked that I should be applying for his job. Told me bluntly they weren't going to hire me, because there's no way I'd stick around long. Guess he would have been right...

treeman792• 3 years ago

High IQ usually means easily bored. Easily bored is bad for boring jobs.

mediaman• 3 years ago

Sounds like it was a high pass filter, and that IQ was a necessary but insufficient condition. Or they just had too many applicants.

For what it's worth, g-factor is correlated to many different cognitive abilities. A person's individual competency areas are highly correlated to other competency areas. For a job where cognitive ability is relevant, knowing the g-factor is predictive of job performance.

jackmott42• 3 years ago

IQ tests correlate with many real world outcomes, including:

* income

* marriage stability

* going to prison or not

* job performance

to name a few

The correlation for these things is of course is not 1.0, but its not negligible either. However that isn't really the use, the use is for identifying social/environmental/genetic things that are effecting a populations intelligence. Exactly the sort of thing this article is looking at.

soared• 3 years ago

I don’t know whether it’s true but I’d bet money that parents net worth, avg income, or zip code are even better predictor of those outcomes.

jstarfish• 3 years ago

Are IQ tests ever useful for determining something in the real world, something that impacts us?

It's a test of creative problem solving.

Anybody who aces one would certainly be a good candidate for a follow-up interview, but the test alone isn't everything. It's possible to be really inventive but underqualified in some other way.

I could see this being of particular interest for a financial services firm, where "creative accounting" is the name of the game.

Why not just send people the take home assignment directly?

People cheat. The IQ test made the employer feel like they at least know something objective about you enough to merit continuing with your interview.

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

It's a test of creative problem solving.

I doubt that one showed that. It was just a test of visual shapes/pattern recognition. Could you quickly spot the next recurring shape/pattern from the previous five. How dopes this demonstrate creative problem solving?

paws• 3 years ago

Pretty sure I know which company you're talking about b/c I had the same experience. I read somewhere the IQ test may be a mandate from the CEO.

I actually had to take the silly IQ test twice, once on my own and a second time with a webcam proctor who watched me (its as awkward as it sounds).

Anyway the proctor told me I got a perfect score, so I next completed the take home, with all three solutions passing the tests (in an optimal way AFAICT). Got rejected anyway.

The IQ part felt like a big waste of time for me as well as the proctor. So long as they insist on this silly game I agree to not bother applying there.

Every situation is different etc but speaking for myself BNPL seems fundamentally unattractive given how many credit card benefits you'd forego [1]

[1] https://www.cardratings.com/financial-literacy/what-is-buy-n...

unsupp0rted• 3 years ago

The lower one’s IQ, the more likely they are to agree to an IQ test as an interview condition, instead of walking away. Unless they happen to be intellectually curious about their result, I suppose.

1letterunixname2• 3 years ago

A George Carlin quote would be apropos here.

Furthermore, it's worth considering both the cultural biases skewing multiple choice tests and the rebasing of tests to maintain 100 as being the "mean" value. If IQ tests were absolutely sensitive and specific for performance prediction, corporations would find a way to administer them. At best, MBTI personality tests are sometimes included as part of an overall candidate profile. It's an easier signal to use university pedigree such as Ivy or JEE as a proxy for properties, rewarding a type of monocultural groupthink.

If you want to see someone highly-motivated, consider a parent with kids and a mortgage on the brink of bankruptcy. They'll pass all sorts of tests and get shit done. People who have been through difficult circumstances tend to be the most capable and highest achieving. Special forces and startups tend to attract a mix of people who grew up poor, semi-abused, and/or semi-homeless and race car drivers/fighter pilot types.

1auralynn• 3 years ago

I was recently talking to an elementary science teacher and she was saying that the kids are worse in everything except, surprisingly, physics/spatial reasoning. My guess: Minecraft/Roblox/etc. They spend hours and hours building stuff and playing/maneuvering in 3D.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Based on my admittedly limited understanding of the Flynn effect, the thing that's notable about this is not that American IQs are going down, because the same thing has been observed in Norwegian, UK, and Australian groups as well. The interesting thing about this is that until recently America was somewhat unusual in that measured IQs had NOT been going down or plateauing like they had in many other countries. The article makes no mention of the observed Flynn effect reversal, and would seem to imply that it is unique to America.

(I think all of this is really silly, and put very little credence in IQ tests as an instrument, or lean on the Flynn effect as anything but a sort of interesting metaphor for progress in the 20th century)

awestroke• 3 years ago

Probably just fewer and fewer people with lead poisoning as the population is gradually replaced

mdp20219• 3 years ago

put very little credence

Others put very high credence in the decline they see around them (cultural, educational, attitudinal), and in other information such as the different articles noting doubling of dementia and cognitive issues in a few handful of years in several territories.

dang• 3 years ago

Recent and related:

American IQ scores have rapidly dropped, proving the 'Reverse Flynn effect' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511744 - April 2023 (456 comments)

up2isomorphism• 3 years ago

Just admit that average American is getting dumber.

It is not a exciting thing to ack but at least we know that our school system are not doing its job.

You can not on one hand only give false feedback creating impression that every kids are doing fine while on the other hand hope them to realize that some of them actually are actually bad at doing something so they should work hard to improve (or abandon it for something they are actually good at)

ChuckNorris894• 3 years ago

The thing is, America can afford to have its school system be the worst while also being the most expensive, because it compensates through skilled immigration from countries which have ambitious people with great schools (Asia, Eastern Europe), and also from having the best research universities along with top paying companies, ensuring US's technological superiority.

Linus Torvalds or Andrej Karpathy didn't go to school in the US, but they made their careers there, so as long as the US will be the No. 1 gathering place for the world's top minds (and highest salaries), it has nothing to worry about.

It might just as well not have a school system at all. /s

Edit: I'm not from the US, it's just how I see it from my PoV

mynameishere• 3 years ago

The Flynn effect covered up the dysgenic trend that has been steady for a long time--probably since 1800 in the West. That effect is played out and we will see a steady reduction from now on, assuming no major social changes.

The Flynn effect itself was likely caused by a combination of nutrition, access to early education, and (simply put) a familiarity with IQ test formats. I never see people mention the latter, but imagine someone from 1932 being presented with an IQ test. The very process (3d shapes, analogies, numbers backwards?) would have been baffling for 100 percent of recipients.

mdp20219• 3 years ago

The very process ... would have been baffling for 100 percent of recipients

Which means that the scores would have remained unchanged: result values are not absolute but relative to the population.

e-dant• 3 years ago

This is the website containing the test: https://www.sapa-project.org/survey/start.php

I don’t know about you, but I definitely wouldn’t hit either of those buttons taking up most of my screen, and I definitely wouldn’t give out specific information on the second screen.

ke88y• 3 years ago

Yeah, I wonder how much of this is just an Eternal September effect.

Americans’ IQ scores are lower in some areas, higher in one

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