HMM: American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the ‘Reverse Flynn Effect.’

The study, published in the journal Intelligence, used an online, survey-style personality test called the Synthetic Aperture Personality Assessment Project to analyze nearly 400,000 Americans. The researchers recorded responses from 2006 and 2018, in order to examine if and how cognitive ability scores were changing over time within the country. The data showed drops in logic and vocabulary (known as verbal reasoning), visual problem solving and analogies (known as matrix reasoning), and computational and mathematical abilities (known as letter and number series).

On the flip side, however, scores in spatial reasoning (known as 3D rotation) followed the opposite pattern, trending upward over the 12-year period. “There’s a debate about what’s causing it, but not every domain is going down; one of them is going up,” Elizabeth Dworak, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University and one of the authors on the study, says in a news release. “If all the scores were going in the same direction, you could make a nice little narrative about it, but that’s not the case. We need to do more to dig into it.”

Less stringent reading and writing assignments, more 3D videogames?