How real is the Flynn effect? Part II

 

Can you pass a Grade 8 exam that was given to American children in 1912? Why the Flynn effect never really happened.

 

 

My last post elicited a tweet from Elon Bachman:

 

Argument by incredulity (w.r.t. retardation) bedevils discussions of intelligence data. What's striking about most retards is the *congenital* speech & motor impairment, not the level of g. Height also increased 1 SD last century. There used to be a lot of malnourished peasants. @ElonBachman

 

In a population with an average IQ of 100, an IQ below 70 is usually due to abnormal circumstances, either freak accidents during pregnancy or rare mutations that haven’t been eliminated by natural selection. In either case, the adverse effects are wide-ranging and affect many aspects of mind and behavior. If your IQ is below 70, you’re lacking in much more than cognitive ability. You probably suffer from various speech and motor impairments. In short, you look and act “funny.”

 

A century ago, if we use current norming of IQ tests, average IQ was below 70 in the Western world. Yet it was not associated with looking and acting “funny.” How come?  For Elon Bachman, this is because an IQ of 70 was normal back then. It was not an outcome of freak accidents or rare mutations. The mental deficit was therefore confined to cognitive ability alone.

 

I understand that argument. Nonetheless, the increase in IQ between then and now is still 35 points—more than two standard deviations. Such a difference in cognitive ability should be visible in popular culture, particularly the books and newspapers that people read. It should also be visible in the academic requirements of elementary school, which was compulsory by that time in most North American jurisdictions.

 

The following are some questions from a Grade 8 exam that was given in 1912 to children in Bullitt County, Kentucky:

 

Find cost at 12½ cents per sq. yd. of kalsomining the walls of a room 20 ft. long, 16 ft. wide and 9 ft. high, deducting 1 door 8 ft. by 4 ft. 6 in. and 2 windows 5 ft. by 3 ft. 6 in. each.

 

A man sold a watch for $180 and lost 16 2/3%. What was the cost of the watch?

 

How many parts of speech are there? Define each.

 

What is a personal pronoun? Decline I.

 

Define longitude and latitude.

 

Tell what you know of the Gulf Stream.

 

Through what waters would a vessel pass in going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?

 

Compare arteries and veins as to function. Where is the blood carried to be purified?

 

Define Cerebrum; Cerebellum.

 

Define the following forms of government: Democracy, Limited Monarchy, Absolute Monarchy, Republic. Give examples of each.

 

Name five county officers and the principal duties of each.

 

What is a copyright? Patent right?

 

Describe the Battle of Quebec.

 

Name the last battle of the Civil War; War of 1812; French and Indian War and the commanders in each battle.

 

Those are only a few of the questions. The full exam is here.

 

I understand why some want to believe that Western societies were much less intelligent a century ago. If we cannot use IQ to compare different populations over time, perhaps we cannot use it to compare different populations over space, i.e., in different parts of the world. And then what?

 

I’ve heard that sort of argument before. “If we accept genetic determinism for this, we may have to accept it for that. And then what?” If that’s your frame of mind, I have nothing more to say.

 

The increase in IQ and the increase in height during the 20th century

 

But what about the increase in height? That was real. If insufficient nutrition held back height during the 20th century, it should have also held back cognitive ability. The assumption here is that IQ and height are equally constrained by nutrition during development. Has that assumption been tested?

 

It has. The Dutch suffered a terrible famine during the winter of 1944-1945, as did much of continental Europe. Yet that famine had no discernable impact on the mental development of unborn children from that time:

 

A detailed retrospective study was made of 125,000 19-yr-old male Dutch military inductees of whom 20,000 were exposed to the Netherland's winter famine, 1944-1945, through maternal starvation. […] Findings show that (a) starvation during pregnancy had no detectable effects on adult mental performance of surviving male offspring. (b) Mental performance of surviving adult males from the entire population had no association with changing levels of mean birth weight in a hospital sample from the population. And (c) there was a strong association of social class with mental performance. (Stein et al. 1972)

 

It isn’t as if the Flynn effect didn’t occur in the Netherlands, As James Flynn points out:

 

As for nutrition, to my knowledge no one has actually shown that American or British or Western European children have a better diet today than they did in 1950, indeed, the critics of junk food argue that diets are worse. Yet, post-1950 IQ gains have been very large. Military samples tested in 1952, 1962, 1972, and 1982 show that Dutch males made a 20-point gain on a Raven’s-type test (Flynn, 1987, p. 172). Even the latest period shows a huge gain, that is, the Dutch 18-year olds tested in 1982 outscored the Dutch 18-year olds tested in 1972 by fully 8 IQ points. Did the quality of the Dutch diet really escalate that much in 10 years? The gains posted by the 1962 males over the 1952 males are interesting. (Flynn 2008)

 

Those 1962 males were born or still in the womb during the 1944-45 famine. Yet they “do not show up even as a blip in the pattern of Dutch IQ gains” (Flynn 2008). One could argue that the famine was too brief to affect cognitive ability. Perhaps malnutrition needs a longer time span to affect mental development. And again, what about the increase in height? What was driving that increase?

 

We don’t know for sure. We do know that height increased independently of the increase in IQ.

 

Norway was cited above as a nation in which the nutrition hypothesis is viable thanks to greater gains in the lower half of the IQ distribution. Actually, it counts against the posited connection between height gains and IQ gains. Height gains have been larger in the upper half of the height distribution than in the lower half (Sundet et al., 2004). This combination, greater height gains in the upper half of the distribution, greater IQ gains in the lower, poses a serious problem. Are there two kinds of enhanced nutrition, one of which raises height more than it does IQ, the other of which raises IQ more than it does height? (Flynn 2008)

 

There is no common cause behind the increase in IQ and the increase in height. The latter seems to be due to people eating a more varied diet after the Second World War. In particular, fewer and fewer people were subsisting largely on bread. That food item is problematic not only because it lacks many nutrients but also because it has a high content of phytic acid, which binds to calcium and other essential minerals in the food we eat (Harrison and Mellanby 1939; McCance and Widdowson 1942a; McCance and Widdowson 1942b; Sandstead 1992). With the postwar boom, and with efforts to educate people about the benefits of a balanced diet, bread made up a smaller and smaller proportion of total food intake. Bones could now fully develop.

 

Excessive consumption of bread, and the resulting lack of essential minerals, constrained skeletal development during the early 20th century. But it did not constrain cognitive ability.

 

References

 

Flynn, J.R. (2008). Requiem for nutrition as the cause of IQ gains: Raven's gains in Britain 1938-2008. Economics and Human Biology 7(1):18-27. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2009.01.009

 

Harrison, D.C., and E. Mellanby. (1939). Phytic acid and the rickets-producing action of cereals. Biochemical Journal 33: 1660-1680. https://doi.org/10.1042%2Fbj0331660

 

McCance, R.A., and E.M. Widdowson. (1942a). Mineral metabolism of healthy adults on white and brown bread dietaries. The Journal of Physiology 101: 44-85. https://doi.org/10.1113%2Fjphysiol.1942.sp003967

 

McCance, R.A., and E.M. Widdowson. (1942b). Mineral metabolism on dephytinized bread. The Journal of Physiology 101: 304-313. https://doi.org/10.1113%2Fjphysiol.1942.sp003984

 

Sandstead, H.H. (1992). Fiber, phytates, and mineral nutrition. Nutrition Reviews 50: 30-31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-4887.1992.tb02464.x

 

Sieczkowksi, C. (2013). 1912 Eighth-Grade Exam Stumps 21st-Century Test Takers. Could You Pass This Eighth-Grade Exam from 1912? Huffpost, August 12. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/1912-eighth-grade-exam_n_3744163

 

Stein, Z., M. Susser, G. Saenger, and F. Marolla. (1972). Nutrition and mental performance. Science 178(4062): 708–713. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.178.4062.708

 

Sundet, J.M., D.G. Barlaug, and T.M. Torjussen. (2004). The end of the Flynn effect? A study of secular trends in mean intelligence test scores of Norwegian conscripts during half a century. Intelligence 32: 349– 362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2004.06.004

 

 

 

 

Getting the message

 

Gaps between perceived and actual crime rates, by immigrant group in the Netherlands. Dutch people underestimate the crime rate of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean while overestimating the crime rate of lighter-skinned immigrants, including Roma, Turks, and Chinese. The latter don’t benefit from the messaging of modern culture.

 

 

The crime news is unfair to Negroes, on the one hand, in that it emphasizes individual cases instead of statistical proportions [...] and, on the other hand, in that all other aspects of Negro life are neglected in the white press which gives the unfavorable crime news an undue weight. Sometimes the white press "creates" a Negro crime wave where none actually exists. (Myrdal 1944, pp. 655-656)

 

Gunnar Myrdal wrote An American Dilemma during the early years of the civil rights movement. He won over many young educated people, particularly when he argued that prejudice was making Black American criminality seem worse than it really was:

 

The popular belief that all Negroes are inherently criminal operates to increase arrests, and the Negro's lack of political power prevents a white policeman from worrying about how many Negro arrests he makes. Some white criminals have made use of these prejudices to divert suspicion away from themselves onto Negroes: for example, there are many documented cases of white robbers blackening their faces when committing crimes. (Myrdal 1944, p. 968)

 

The theme of the "framed Black man" would be central to a work of fiction, To Kill a Mockingbird. Since its publication in 1960 it has never been out of print. In 2006, it was the book most often mentioned when British librarians were asked: "Which book should every adult read before they die?" (Pauli 2006). Thus, for at least six decades, there has been a social norm of downplaying Black crime.

 

This norm has spread not only within the United States but also to all countries where English is widely used, particularly among the university-educated. In fact, it has spread to countries that never had black slavery or Jim Crow, or even a substantial African minority until recent times.

 

Perceptions and realities of crime in the Netherlands

 

One such country is the Netherlands. In a recent survey, 615 Dutch adults were given the following instructions:

 

There are many different immigrant groups in the Netherlands. For each of the groups, adjust the slider to your estimation of the crime rate relative to Dutch natives. This means you should adjust the slider to two (2) if you think the crime rate of this group is twice that of natives. (Kirkegaard and Gerritsen 2021, p. 4)

 

The actual crime rate of each immigrant group is known from public data published by the government. It was thus possible to measure how much the survey respondents overestimated or underestimated the criminality of each immigrant group. The respondents were chosen by two polling firms. A little over two-thirds of them came from a firm that tended to select younger and more university-educated people.

 

The findings are shown in the above graph. On the y-axis, the crime rate is overestimated at values higher than zero and underestimated at values lower than zero. The x-axis shows the percentage of Muslims in the immigrants' home country.

 

Kirkegaard and Gerritsen (2021, pp. 12-17) argue that the results show a pro-Muslim bias: the respondents tended to underestimate the crime rate of Muslim immigrants. But the bias was not favorable toward all Muslims. In fact, the crime rate was overestimated for immigrants from Indonesia, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and more or less correctly estimated for those from Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. In addition, the respondents showed much larger gaps between perception and reality when estimating the crime rates of different non-Muslim groups.

 

For source countries less than 25% Muslim, the crime rate was greatly underestimated (by a factor of 1 or more) for people from Congo, Angola, Cape Verde, the Netherlands Antilles, and the Dominican Republic. Conversely, it was greatly overestimated for people from Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Mexico.

 

Do you see a pattern? The respondents were underestimating the crime rate of immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Their pro-Black bias was much stronger than their supposed pro-Muslim bias. In fact, it was so strong that it affected their perceptions of different Muslim groups. The respondents perceived North Africans and Somalis as being better than they really are, while perceiving Turks as being worse than they really are.

 

It looks like people in the Netherlands, and probably throughout the West, are being conditioned to view the Black African phenotype positively and the White European phenotype negatively. This bias caused the respondents to overestimate the arrest rate not only of European immigrants but also of any group that deviates too far from the Black African phenotype, including Chinese, Mexicans and, apparently, Roma.(1)

 

What about the respondents who voted for Nationalist parties? You know, the “far right.” Although Nationalist voters were more inclined to overestimate the crime rate of Muslim immigrants, they were just as inclined to underestimate the crime rate of sub-Saharan African and Caribbean immigrants. The pro-Black bias seems very pervasive.

 

 

Note

 

1. Roma in Western Europe identify themselves to the authorities by their country of origin, not by their ethnicity. The Dutch respondents greatly overestimated the crime rate of immigrants from Romania, and the recent wave of Romanian migrants is widely perceived to be mostly Roma:

 

In these figures, the number relating to the Roma is indeterminate since the ethnicity of asylum seekers is not recorded. Nonetheless, the assumption is that the majority of these applications were made by Roma. Certainly, the press is of this view. Articles discussing Czech or Romanian asylum seekers refer frequently to the Roma. As a result, it is easy for the ordinary member of the public to assume that such groups of applicants are of Roma extraction (Stevens 2003, p. 440)

 

 

References

 

Kirkegaard, E.O.W., and A. Gerritsen. (2021). A study of stereotype accuracy in the Netherlands: immigrant crime, occupational sex distribution, and provincial income inequality. OpenPsych, June 14 https://openpsych.net/paper/60/  

https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2021.06.14

 

Myrdal, G. (1944). An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

 

Pauli, M. (2006). Harper Lee tops librarians' must-read list. The Guardian, March 2

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/mar/02/news.michellepauli  

 

Stevens, D.E. (2003). The Migration of the Romanian Roma to the UK: A Contextual Study. European Journal of Migration and Law 5(4): 439-461.

https://doi.org/10.1163/157181603322849343