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A new study from Norway has a lot to say about the Flynn effect, which is the gradual increase in IQ that has occurred over time.
Norway has some of the best data for investigating the Flynn effect. The country tested nearly every young adult male with an intelligence test from 1957 through 2008 as part of the conscription process. (After that time, some men were filtered out and women were added to the examinee population.) The country also has never changed their intelligence test in that time. You can see example questions here:
These characteristics allow researchers to test whether the increase in scores is due to a change in test functioning or an actual increase in mental ability. The charts below show how scores on the three subtests (on the left) and the overall IQ (on the right) have increased from 1957 through 1993 before a decrease happened.
As the graphs show, fluid reasoning (i.e., matrix items) performance has been steady for the past generation, while vocabulary and math performance have decreased since the peak in 1993. In fact, math calculation is lower now than in 1957!
All of this (plus some other, more sophisticated analyses) means that the test is not functioning the same way now as it did when it was created. As a result, IQs on this test can NOT be compared apples-to-apples across years. This means that it is not possible to say that young adult in 1993 were smarter than their parents' or their children's generations.
This also means that the Flynn effect is a collection of increases and decreases acting independently on different tasks/subtests. The authors believe that vocabulary score decreases are due to the language from the 1957 test becoming antiquated. They also believe that the decreases in math calculation are due to a change in the Norwegian education system shifting away from hand calculation to conceptual math knowledge. Matrix reasoning, though, is all about patterns, and those have stayed an important part of thinking in the schooling system.
Findings like this help solve the paradox that James Flynn brought attention to in the 1980s. The fact that the score increase is due to specific test properties (and not a general increase in ability) is how the IQs could increase so much without people seeming to be massively smarter than their parents.
