Not what you think

Preparing for a test (Wikicommons - Excelz)



Why do West African immigrants outperform native-born whites in UK schools? This is the question posed by Chanda Chisala using data from the GCSE, the General Certificate of Secondary Education. 

To be sure, the GCSE is not the same as an IQ test. For most subjects it includes things like coursework and attendance. The test-taker is also motivated by self-interest: a high GCSE score can be a ticket to a good university and a good job. Nonetheless, Thompson (2013) has argued that the GCSE has a correlation of 0.81 with IQ. So perhaps the two are roughly equivalent.

Let's look at the GCSE results from England for 2012. They are indeed astounding for immigrant children from English-speaking Africa. Just look at the percentage difference from the mean by country of origin:

Nigerians -     +21.8
Ghanaians -     +5.5
Sierra Leone - +1.4

Source: Chisala (2019)

This academic excellence seems to be unusually concentrated among Nigerian immigrants. Are we looking at our friends from the Niger delta? Often known as the "Jews of West Africa," the Igbo have a long record of academic and economic success. This has been attributed to their openness to Western learning and the commercial opportunities it creates, although the Igbo were, in fact, a trading nation long before the colonial era (Frost 2015). They became receptive to Western learning because they had long been receptive to learning in general, much like the Japanese during the Meiji era.

Chisala (2015) provides an ethnic breakdown of GCSE results for the years 2009 to 2011:

2009: Igbo - 100%, Yoruba - 39%
2010: Igbo - 80%, Yoruba - 68%
2011: Igbo - 76%, Yoruba - 75%

The Igbo started off as top achievers, but their lead evaporated over the next two years as the Yoruba made remarkable gains. There were 90 Yoruba kids, so sampling error could hardly explain their increase from 39% to 75%. Because the Igbo kids numbered only 16, the decrease from 100% to 76% might not be significant.

Perhaps the Yoruba kids got better coaching and tutoring. Whatever the explanation, GCSE cannot be used as a proxy for IQ, at least not for Nigerians. Yes, IQ can change over the course of a lifespan, but not that fast and not that much—unless you suffer a serious accident.


Exam malpractice

There are less innocent explanations for the rapid rise in Yoruba scores. A study of students in Nigeria found that test-retest reliability ranged from 77 to 85% (Petters and Okon 2014). The authors blame the low test reliability on cheating, calling it "a plague":

Examination malpractice in Nigeria has attained a frightening proportion and it is becoming more sophisticated as years pass by. Efforts by government and stakeholders to curtail this trend have not yielded much success. If this trend is not given an urgent attention, it may utterly destroy the quality of education in Nigeria.

Bisong et al. (2009) come to similar conclusions:

The implication of this study is that the cheating tendency is becoming endemic in Nigerian society. A situation where one in every four students tends to cheat in every examination calls for a significant moral questioning of our society. Even with a high level of supervision, as the results show, students are still prone to indulge in cheating behaviour.

In their review of the literature, Bisong et al. (2009) note that "in 1980, out of the 190,000 candidates who sat the West African Examination Certificate in May and June, 46,000 candidates from Nigeria had their results nullified." Cheating is partly due to Nigerian parents, who understand the value of academic success and push their children to get good grades "by all means":

Parents expect nothing less than passing in examination from their children. There must not be failure. That is to say that he who fails is not entertained in any way. Where there is weakness or a psychological measure that one is not prepared to pass the examination, then fear begins to disturb the minds of students as to how to make it. This leads to serious reading throughout the night, pressing lectures for areas of concentration and arranging to enter the examination hall with every possible means to cheat during the examination. (Halima 2003, p. 17)

Halima (2003, p. 19) notes the harshness of penalties for cheating: "in 1983 the punishment for cheating was increased to a jail term of 21 years without the option for fine. In spite of this cheating in examination increased."


Nigeria's cognitive elite?

It has been argued, notably by Greg Cochran, that Nigerian immigrants are skimmed from the top of their country's IQ distribution (Cochran 2019). They are the best that Nigeria has to offer—la crème de la crème. To make that argument work, however, Nigerian immigrants to the UK would have to be much smarter than the average Nigerian, with an IQ more than one standard deviation higher and probably two.

There is only a rough consensus on the mean IQ of sub-Saharan Africa. In their review of the literature, Wicherts et al. (2010) argue for a mean of 82, whereas Lynn (2010) puts it at 66. Rindermann (2013) favors a "best guess" of 75. Even if we take the high estimate of 82, we must still assume extreme selection to get a mean IQ above 100. Is that a reasonable assumption?  Elite individuals exist among immigrants from Nigeria, but they are not the majority: 

Socially, the Nigerian diaspora is by no means homogenous. There are those who struggle for basic means of survival such as car park attendants, cleaners and other menial workers working long hours to make ends meet. But some professionals have distinguished themselves and moved on to become members of the Black middle class. (Akinrinade and Ogen 2011)

Furthermore, some doubt may be cast on the credentials of middle-class Nigerians: "they have acquired a notorious reputation for arrogance and fraud" (Akinrinade and Ogen 2011). Finally, the cognitive elite argument fails to explain why immigrants from Nigeria do so much better than those from Ghana and Sierra Leone.


Math scores

On many GCSE components, there is much room for cheating, particularly on coursework. But what about the mathematics component? GCSE math has not had coursework since 2009. It is simply a timed test. How can one cheat on a timed test?

By impersonation. A "ghost" who knows the subject takes the exam by impersonating the student, and the actual student never takes the exam (Azuka 2014). This method requires a photo ID that combines the ghost's photo with the test-taker's name. In most cases, the fake ID is sufficient to dispel any suspicions.


Conclusion

For whatever reason, the GCSE is too volatile to be used as a proxy for IQ, particularly in the case of Nigerian students. The volatility seems to be due to cheating, as well as to the grey area of coaching and tutoring services. Cheating is rife among Nigerians in Nigeria, and it would be naïve to suppose that such behavior disappears once they relocate to another country, especially if their new country imposes none of the harsh penalties that are regularly imposed in Nigeria.

Nigerian academic achievement may be genuine in some cases. This is particularly so with respect to the Igbo, who have a longstanding record of achievement within and outside school. Unfortunately, genuine ability can be cofounded with fake ability. Smart people are better at gaming the system and making themselves look smarter than they really are.

Indeed, I can't help wondering when I look at the GCSE results for Igbo students in 2009. Every single Igbo got a perfect score—that's unusual even for a smart population and even with a sample size that small. Chanda suggests that year-to-year fluctuations might have made the sample even smaller in that year. Well, perhaps.

It would be easy to say that we need more data. Additional GCSE results, however, will be just as distorted by academic fraud. We need data from real IQ tests that provide no incentive for cheating.


References

Akinrinade, S., and O. Ogen. (2011). Historicising the Nigerian Diaspora: Nigerian Migrants and Homeland Relations. Turkish Journal of Politics 2(2): 71-85.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/31034426/tjp_sayi_4.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DTurkish_Journal_of_Politics_TJP_V._2_N..pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A%2F20191221%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20191221T170342Z&X-Amz-Expires=3600&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=033191eb3309b04839db9b399a1976750b779991740778b6044b92573f0b1501#page=73

Azuka, E.B. (2014). Academic Fraud among Students in Higher Education in Nigeria: Reasons, Methods Adopted and Strategies to curb it. Journal of Educational and Social Research 4(3): 289-296.
https://www.mcser.org/journal/index.php/jesr/article/view/2725 

Bisong, N.N., F. Akpama, and P.B. Edet. (2009). Cheating Tendency in Examinations among Secondary School Students in Nigeria:  a case study of schools in the Odukpani Local Government Area, Cross River State. Policy Futures in Education 7(4): 410-415
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1030.3426&rep=rep1&type=pdf  
Chisala, C. (2019). Why Do Blacks Outperform Whites in UK Schools? The Unz Review, November 29
https://www.unz.com/article/reply-to-lance-welton-why-do-blacks-outperform-whites-in-uk-schools/?showcomments#comments 

Chisala, C. (2015). UK: Igbo Nigeria Academic performance destroys the myth of Black Low IQ. Afripol November 28
http://afripol.org/afripol/item/1813-uk-nigerian-academic-performance-in-destroys-the-myth-of-black-low-iq.html

Cochran, G. (2019). Selective immigration. West Hunter, March 13
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2019/03/13/selective-immigration/

Frost, P. (2015). The Jews of West Africa? The Unz Review, July 4
https://www.unz.com/pfrost/the-jews-of-west-africa/ 

Halima, D. (2003). A study of some socio-psychological factors of cheating in examination among students of Kaduna Polytechnic. Post Graduate School Ahmadu Bello University Zaria.
http://kubanni.abu.edu.ng/jspui/bitstream/123456789/2190/1/A%20%20STUDY%20OF%20SOME%20SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL%20FACTORS%20OF%20CHEATING%20IN%20EXAMINATION%20AMONY%20STUDENTS%20OF%20%20KADUNA%20POLYTECHNIC.pdf 

Lynn, R. (2010). The average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans assessed by the Progressive Matrices: A reply to Wicherts, Dolan, Carlson & van der Maas. Learning and Individual Differences 20(3): 152-154.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608010000348

Petters, J.S., and M.O. Okon. (2014). Students' Perception of Causes and Effects of Examination Malpractice in the Nigerian Educational System: The Way Forward for Quality Education. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 114: 125-129
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281305310X

Rindermann, H. (2013). African cognitive ability: Research, results, divergences and recommendations. Personality and Individual Differences 55: 229-233.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.372.5462&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Thompson, J. (2013). IQ and GCSE Results in England R=0.81. The Unz Review, November 5
https://www.unz.com/jthompson/iq-and-gcse-results-in-england-r081/ 

Wicherts, J.M., C.V. Dolan, and H.L.J. van der Maas. (2010). A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans. Intelligence 38: 1-20.
http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010b.pdf

Outsourcing torture and execution

Member of an American prison gang (Wikicommons: Border Brothers). A jail sentence is no longer just a jail sentence.

When my scholarship was cancelled I began looking for short-term contracts to support myself. At that time Quebec City offered little in the way of long-term employment, but demand was strong for bilingual contractuels who knew software packages like WordPerfect (which was not at all user-friendly in the late 1980s). 

One day I got a call from a maximum security prison west of Quebec City. A renewable six-month clerical position. Good pay. But I'd have to get vaccinated for hepatitis B. "You never know. There's always a risk of rape in these places." I politely declined. Later someone else phoned to reassure me that the risk was "minimal" and nothing to worry about. I still declined.

Rape and assault are frequent in prisons. This is no surprise. More surprisingly, prison violence is becoming a deliberate form of punishment—a way to make the original sentence a lot worse. This punitive function has been discussed in a recent paper:

To what extent are rapes, beatings, and other assaults essential to the punitive function of the modern prison? Officially, violence of this sort is unlawful and clearly outside the bounds of legitimate punishment. The United States Supreme Court has declared more than once that being assaulted is not "part of the penalty that criminal offenders pay for their offenses against society."

[...] In reality, violence thoroughly defines the prison experience. Prisoners face a substantial risk of being beaten, raped, and even killed at the hands of their fellow inmates or keepers. In a way that is sometimes difficult for those who are unfamiliar with prison to appreciate, prisoners inhabit a world comprehensively defined by this kind of violence. Such violence is the dominant arbiter of social status in prison. It is the means by which authority, hierarchy, and privilege are articulated among prisoners and between prisoners and their keepers. And it is, paradoxically, the most reliable protection against being the victim of violence. (White 2008, pp. 737-738)

When did this punitive function come to be? To some extent it has always existed, but it began to gain much more importance during the "demographic shift" of the 1960s and 1970s (White 2008, pp. 745-746). The baby boom was invading all spheres of life, and this dramatic growth in the number of young people coincided with a weakening of informal social controls by family and church. People were also moving from rural communities (where these informal controls were strong) to big cities (where they were weak). All of these factors facilitated an explosion of criminal behavior, especially the violent sort that young males specialize in. American prisons were overwhelmed, "and by the mid 1970s the correctional model had totally collapsed, superseded by a very different regime" (White 2008, p. 745).

Male violence: pathological in some societies, normal in others

This surge of violent crime happened in all racial groups, but much more in African Americans. Why? The usual explanation is social deprivation. Young men turn to violence when denied full access to education, employment, and social acceptance. Such behavior is abnormal and will disappear in normal circumstances.

That view of “normal” behavior applies only to some societies. Elsewhere, young men are supposed to fight. And not simply as a last resort. They're expected to fight proactively, as a means to gain status, to impress women, and to strike terror in potential enemies (Frost 2010; Frost and Harpending 2015). 

This is in contrast to pacified societies, where the State has imposed a monopoly on violence, and where even self-defense is not always a sufficient excuse. In such societies, violent behavior is criminalized and pathologized. The ideal young man goes to "school" and "work" without ever using violence to defend himself and his family, or even to impress women. Sheesh!

Pacified societies exist throughout much of Europe and East Asia, with interesting exceptions. The strong arm of the State has historically been weak in mountainous regions, like Albania and the Caucasus, and this is also where men are most willing to act violently on their own behalf. In England, endemic violence persisted until the 18th century in the northern border regions, where any encounter with non-kin, however innocent, could turn violent. Disputes would grow into long-running feuds if not settled through payment of blood money (Fischer 1989, pp. 621-632).

These two kinds of society can work fairly well ... if kept apart. In non-pacified societies, the level of personal violence is not as high as one might expect. A sort of dynamic equilibrium makes young men think twice before acting violently, since any violence will be repaid in kind by the victim, his brothers, and his male kin. So violence tends to target people who cannot retaliate, either because they're physically weak or because they have no kinfolk to stand up for them. 

Problems begin when these two kinds of society co-exist on the same territory. When the non-pacified society becomes sufficiently numerous, but not necessarily the majority, it can impose its rules, and everyone will have to play by them. If you cannot fight back and have no "brothers" to defend you, there remains only one option: submit. This is now the case in American prisons and, increasingly, in prisons throughout the Western world.

Indeed, the demographic profile of prisons has changed a lot even in Western Europe, where native Europeans make up fewer and fewer of the inmates. More and more are from societies where State control of personal violence is recent and widely perceived as being illegitimate. They come mostly from North Africa, West Africa, Somalia, Southwest Asia, and South Asia. They are predominantly Muslim, and the Muslim proportion of the prison population gives a rough idea of the demographic shift. This proportion is 60 to 70% in France (Moore 2008), 45% in Belgium (Sudinfo.be 2013), and 15% in the United Kingdom (Allen and Watson 2017, p. 14). Furthermore, Muslim inmates have power beyond their numbers because they are willing to fight for each other. This is a recurring theme in interviews with prisoners:

“there's no gangs in Rochester it's just Muslims stick together”, Muslims “walk around the wings in tens” and 'people will say that the only gang in here are the Muslims they always stick up for each other”. For many Muslim prisoners the solidarity engendered by sharing a faith was viewed as presenting certain obligations just as area allegiances required mutual defensive protection for prisoners: “I see Muslims will stay closer together so ...obviously you have to look out for your brother, help his brother, it's a Muslim's duty. And it's like whatever, whatever I want for myself I should want for my brother.” (Phillips 2012, p. 60)

Some prisoners even convert to Islam as a way to get protection (Phillips 2012, p. 62).

Prison violence as an instrument of law enforcement

Beginning in the 1970s, American law-enforcement began to turn this situation to its own advantage, initially to assert control over prisoners:

In some circumstances, it is clear that rape is used by prison officials as a means of control in its own right—as a means of punishing inmates who are (by the officials' reckoning) especially troublesome, of breaking the will of defiant inmates, and of rewarding (by accommodating their victimization of others) inmates who are in some way helpful to the institution's interests. Where rape is sanctioned in this fashion, a victimized inmate has little hope of gaining the institution's protection from further abuse. Even where it is not so sanctioned, victims of rape often encounter considerable indifference on the part of administrators and staff who would rather not antagonize powerful rapists, who anticipate difficulties with successful investigation, or who for some other reason cannot be bothered. Many staff simply may take the position that defense against rapes and other assaults are an inmate's own obligation. (White 2008, p. 757)

This punitive function has since been extended to people currently outside prison. Initially, it helped to keep juvenile delinquents in line by sending them a crude but simple message: if you're not careful, we'll send you to a place where you'll be raped, assaulted, and perhaps killed. 

Today, that message is no longer aimed solely at juvenile delinquents. Every American knows that a prison sentence is a lot more than time behind bars. In theory, the State no longer maims or tortures. In practice, it does … and on a scale not seen since medieval times:

That such violence is so thoroughly unlawful allows it to serve the state as a mode of punishment without the state ever confessing the true extent of its resort to such barbarity and without thereby surrendering much in the way of its legal and political legitimacy. Indeed, by deeming prison violence illegal, the state in its various manifestations can actually condemn the phenomenon, while yet relying on it as part of [the] regime of control. (White 2008, p. 740)

Toward a new regime of control

This regime of control has developed in an atmosphere of "They’ve got it coming to them anyway!" Prison sentences are normally handed down for serious crimes, like murder or gang rape, and there is still a widespread feeling that such people are not being punished enough. In recent years, however, prison sentences have begun to be imposed for minor offenses, especially in the United Kingdom. 

Last year, an English man was found guilty of placing two bacon sandwiches outside the door of a mosque. He was sentenced to a year in jail, and halfway through the sentence he was found dead in his cell (Curtis 2018). The prison sentence is itself incredible. This was a first-time offense that would have been considered a misdemeanor scarcely a decade ago.

A similar sentence was handed down to Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League. Not long into his sentence, the inevitable happened:

"They gave him a pasting. He was being taken for a legal visit and was then put in a room with these guys. The door was locked and the warders all disappeared. He has quite a few injuries to his face and neck and needed two visits to the medical wing." The source said his attackers were Muslim prisoners but that could not be verified. Robinson suspects the situation was engineered by the warders because of the obvious threat posed to him by opponents of the EDL. He fears he is a marked man inside the category A prison. (Gover 2014)

The official reason for the sentence? Making an incorrect statement on a mortgage application—a misdemeanor normally punished by a fine. And for this Tommy Robinson was sent to a category A prison. 

This past week, he was again sentenced to jail:

At 14h00 on 25 May 2018 Judge Denise Marson QC summarily sentenced Robinson and issued a notice under Section 4(2) of the Contempt of Court Act 1981 banning any reporting of the hearing, sentence, evidence offered or any other matter relating to the proceedings against Robinson indefinitely until the conclusion of a series of child grooming trials in Leeds Crown Court. (Wikipedia 2018)

This time, Tommy Robinson was sentenced to jail for broadcasting information that might influence the outcome of a rape gang trial (he was livestreaming outside the courthouse). Yet that information had already been published in a local newspaper. Even more strangely, the judge extended the reporting ban to the outcome of Robinson’s trial. That trial had no jurors to influence. It was a trial by judge and was completed in four hours. One final point: some reports state that the judge simply reactivated an existing suspended sentence, hence the speedy trial. But only a few months remained on that sentence, and this one seems to be much longer. For a new sentence a defendant is normally given time to prepare a defense, find witnesses, and choose a lawyer, rather than having a court-appointed one (as was actually the case).

Because of the reporting ban, news reports on this story have either been pulled or modified. Fox News states that he was sentenced to 13 months in prison despite protests from his lawyer, who said this measure would be tantamount to a death sentence, “given his profile and previous credible threats” (Fox News 2018).

One might wonder about these jail sentences for misdemeanors that hardly justify such punishment. And is the punishment really the time spent behind bars? Or is it something else? Like something in the prison environment that can “finish the job”? A strange collusion seems to be developing between the UK justice system and the vilest elements of prison society.

References

Allen, G. and C. Watson (2017). UK Prison Population Statistics. Briefing Paper. House of Commons Library.

http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04334/SN04334.pdf

Fischer, D.H. (1989). Albion's Seed. Four British Folkways in America, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, pp. 621-632.

Curtis, J. (2018). Man jailed for leaving a bacon sandwich outside a mosque is found dead in prison halfway through his 12-month sentence. Daily Mail, May 27, 2018

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4075328/Man-jailed-leaving-bacon-sandwiched-outside-mosque-dead-prison-half-way-12-month-sentence.html

Fox News (2018). Right-wing activist Tommy Robinson reportedly jailed after filming outside child grooming trial.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/05/26/right-wing-activist-tommy-robinson-reportedly-jailed-after-filming-outside-child-grooming-trial.html

Frost, P. (2010). The Roman State and genetic pacification, Evolutionary Psychology 8(3): 376-389. http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP08376389.pdf  

Frost, P. and H. Harpending. (2015). Western Europe, state formation, and genetic pacification, Evolutionary Psychology 13: 230-243.

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/147470491501300114

Gover, D. (2014). Fear of Muslim Attack Beaten up in Woodhill Prison. International Business Times, February 5

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/edl-founder-tommy-robinson-fear-muslim-attack-beaten-woodhill-prison-1435264

Moore, M. (2008). In France, prisons filled with Muslims, The Washington Post, April 29

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/28/AR2008042802560.html?hpid=topnews

Phillips, C. (2012). 'It ain't nothing like America with the Bloods and the Crips': Gang narratives inside two English prisons. Punishment & Society 14(1): 51-68.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.893.3021&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Sudinfo.be (2013). 45% des détenus des prisons belges sont de confession musulmane, Sudinfo.be, May 23

http://www.sudinfo.be/726092/article/actualite/belgique/2013-05-17/45-des-detenus-des-prisons-belges-sont-de-confession-musulmane

White, A.A. (2008). The Concept of "Less Eligibility" and the Social Function of Prison Violence in Class Society. Buffalo Law Review 56: 737-820.

http://scholar.law.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1310&context=articles

Wikipedia. (2018). Tommy Robinson (activist).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Robinson_%28activist%29#cite_note-79

What happened in the 1980s to reaction time?

 

A steady increase in reaction time seems to begin circa 1980 in Sweden, Great Britain, and the United States (h/t to hbd* chick)

 

Has reaction time been steadily increasing from generation to generation? This was the finding of a paper last year, which argued that mean IQ had fallen in Britain by 13 points since Victorian times (Woodley et al., 2013). The problem here was not the extrapolation from reaction time to IQ, which in any case should not have changed over the past century. The problem was the possibility of sampling bias. The early samples (from the Victorian age) were slanted toward people of elite origin. In one case, they were University of Chicago students; in the other, museum visitors who had paid to take the reaction test. In contrast, the recent samples were much more representative, largely because the educational system had become more universal. Thus, the drop in reaction time over time may be largely, if not wholly, an artefact of better sampling of the general population (hbd* chick, 2013).

This criticism seems less applicable to a study of this drop in more recent times. This study was presented as a conference paper and only the abstract is available. But it does seem interesting:

Here, we show that change in genetic intelligence can be estimated, independently of the Flynn effect, by way of simple reaction time (RT). Data from three studies with different samples from Sweden, UK, and USA converge at an RT increase of 0.7-0.9 ms per year, which corresponds to a decrease in intelligence of between 4 and 5 IQ points per generation, or 1.3-1.7 points per decade in these countries. (Madison, 2014)

That’s a big jump in reaction time. Moreover, most of the increase seems to be squeezed into the last six years of the study, from 1980 to 1985 (see above chart). No selection pressure could have produced such a change over such a short time. So what could possibly be going on here?

Keep in mind that Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States are not closed systems. All three countries are open to the world, and the early 1980s corresponded to a time when they became much more open. Consequently, we are not looking at change within a population, but rather the replacement of one population by another, and this change would have been most noticeable in the school classrooms where these tests were conducted.

The other finding of this study is that the Flynn Effect has been masking a decline in intellectual capacity. Yes, we’re getting better at giving standardized answers to standardized questions, but this change doesn’t reflect an actual increase in intelligence. We’re just allocating more and more mental resources to the task of test-taking. The reaction time data suggest that real intellectual capacity has been declining since circa 1980.

At the same conference, Armstrong (2014) likewise argues that the Flynn Effect may be illusory for the most part:

However, "general intelligence", the biological substrata which cause the positive manifold amongst different IQ tests, has not increased, since the sizes of Flynn effects on different tests are inversely related to those tests' g loadings. The same pattern holds amongst items. Thus, for example, vocabulary size (generally the most or among the most g loaded tests) has shown a small Flynn effect, and by some measures even a decline. However, the "Coding" test (from the Wechsler) or the "Draw-a-Man" test both have low g loadings and have shown very large Flynn effects.

To date, Madison’s paper is unavailable. All we have is an abstract that raises more questions than it answers. We will have to wait for the full paper before a thorough assessment can be made.

 

References

 

Armstrong, E. (2014). LCI14 Elijah Armstrong on Rule Dependence, London Conference on Intelligence, Psychological comments, May 1

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/lci14-elijah-armstrong-on-rule.html  

Hbd* chick (2013). a response to a response to two critical commentaries on woodley, te nijenhuis & murphy (2013), hbd* chick, May 27

http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/a-response-to-a-response-to-two-critical-commentaries-on-woodley-te-nijenhuis-murphy-2013/  

Madison, G. (2014). Increasing simple reaction times demonstrate decreasing genetic intelligence in Scotland and Sweden, London Conference on Intelligence, Psychological comments, April 25

#LCI14 Conference proceedings
http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/lci14-questions-on-intelligence.html  

Woodley, M.A., J. Nijenhuis, and R. Murphy. (2013). Were the Victorians cleverer than us? The decline in general intelligence estimated from a meta-analysis of the slowing of simple reaction time, Intelligence, 41, 843-850.

http://lezgetreal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/were-the-victorians-smarter-than-us.pdf