A new study, published Monday by Norwegian researchers analyzed the IQ scores between 1962 and 1991 and found that scores increased by almost 3 percentage points each decade for those born between 1962 to 1975 – but then saw a steady decline among those born after 1975.
The earlier rise in IQ scores follows the so-called “Flynn effect” – a term for the long-term increase in intelligence levels that occurred during the 20th century, arguably the result of better access to education – according to Stuart Ritchie, a postdoctoral fellow in cognitive ageing at the University of Edinburgh whose research explores IQ scores and intelligence and who was not involved in the new study.
But the new study, along with similar studies in Denmark, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Finland and Estonia, have all demonstrated a similar downward trend in IQ scores since the early 1970s.
As Fox News reports, researchers have long preferred to use genes to explain variations in intelligence over environmental factors. However, the new study turns this thinking on its head.
Anyone who has seen the film “Idiocracy” might already be familiar with these ideas. In the scientific community, the idea of unintelligent parents having more kids and dumbing-down the population is known as the dysgenic fertility theory, but the new study suggests while intelligence is inheritable, it is external factors that play a much bigger part.
So what is driving this sudden reversal in the “Flynn Effect” and causing the dumbing down of the world?
Fox news reports that Ole Rogeberg, a senior research fellow at the Ragnar Frisch Center for Economic Research in Norway and co-author of the new study, believes the change is not due to genetics, but says:
“The causes in IQ increases over time and now the decline is due to external factors.”
“It’s not that dumb people are having more kids than smart people, to put it crudely. It’s something to do with the environment, because we’re seeing the same differences within families,” he said.
By ‘environmental factors’, Rogeberg means external factors that influence the person – not the weather – which he says, could include changes in the education system, media, nutrition, reading less, and being online more, as well as better standards of living.
Robin Morris, a professor of psychology at Kings College in London also confirmed social media’s impact:
“In my view, we need to recognize that as time changes and people are exposed to different intellectual experiences, such as changes in the use of technology, for example social media, the way intelligence is expressed also changes. Educational methods need to adapt to such changes.”
So Nixon started the dumbing down of the world in the early 70s by enabling money-printing (crushing living standards longer-term) and the birth of the internet accelerated the trend (creating an ever more distracted reality)?
Is the developed world – with its interventionist central banks and distracted web-accessing populations about to get caught up by the less social-media savvy and less living-standard-impacted nations of the world?
For now, the solution is simple for a smarter world – stop ‘liking on facebook’ and ‘end the fed’!
Idiocracy has arrived. Duh… look around.
I am almost ‘potentially gifted’.
I imagine me talking to a Somali and being silent.
I Blame reality t.v. and lifestyles of the rich and famous along with professional sports
Reality television hasn’t increased the IQ that’s for sure….and now we have a Reality t.v. persona President!
After the ice bucket challenge, the Tide pod challenge, the condom challenge, I can’t even fathom the next colossal nominee for a Darwin award!
It seems like every week I read about another selfie death too!
IDIOCRACY NOW!
MAYBE that should be a weekly column.
Haha
You’ve heard of Democracy Now!
But NOT IDIOCRACY NOW!
Shit so good make you wanna slap yo motha in law!
So many possible flaws in this “study”. Maybe IQ went up due to better nutrition? Maybe iqs are down because survival of fittest no longer applies and the stupid that would have died out are surviving and breeding. Maybe IQs are down because low IQ sorts are immigrating to affluent high IQ nations and are dragging down the IQs in those nations.
Yeah, it’s called the Kalergi Plan.
what became big as these kids born in the 70 s were growing up?
VIDEO GAMES
Want to know America today? Watch the ignorant, fucking spawn on Judge Judy. That’s what America is today. Fucking obese cattle that have no idea what their forbearers handed them. They need to go.
All it takes is one Somali refugee for every 70 caucasions to reduce the average IQ of the group by half a point. I’m sure their study is accounting for that?
If you are studying long term IQ averages of a nation or population, the demographic changes that take place over that period have to be taken into account as well as other factors that can influence it, then each factor taken into account by itself to see if it has any kind of correlation or not which might imply a causative factor needing further study.
IQ is a measure of one’s ability to learn (not necessarily how much you actually know). When you destroy the incentive to learn or limit the ability to learn, the IQ will suffer. Social media, the internet, government schools (and those private schools modeled after their age-segregated, knowledge-restricted agendas), and so much more, destroy what is an inherent desire of humans to learn. When knowledge is so easily “available” by electronic means, the “need” to memorize seems to vanish, and the inherent desire to learn can quickly whither if not fostered – though the unlimited nature of this information SHOULD be doing just the opposite. Parents who do not care, who do not appreciate their responsibilities, or who pass this critical responsibility off to government bureaucrats, destroy the fertile fields in their children’s brains that would otherwise foster rapacious desires to learn.
Here’s something interesting in relation to IQ that may interest you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
In any event, the higher your IQ the IQ the more likely you are to succeed on your own and the more likely to rise to the top (of the heap, so to speak). That’s why almost all institutions and careers end up having the highest IQ’s at the top of them and usually running and directing whatever institution they are related to. i.e. A physician almost always has a higher IQ than the majority of his patients and nurses and an RN a higher IQ than an LPN. Likewise with the various specialties within the medical system such as surgeons of various types in relation to one another and to GP’s.