In 1979, Christopher Connolly cofounded a psychology consultancy in the United Kingdom to help high achievers (initially athletes, but then others) perform at their best. Over the years, Connolly became curious about why some professionals floundered outside a narrow expertise, while others were remarkably adept at expanding their careers—moving from playing in a world-class orchestra, for example, to running one. Thirty years after he started, Connolly returned to school to do a PhD investigating that very question, under Fernand Gobet, the psychologist and chess international master. Connolly’s primary finding was that early in their careers, those who later made successful transitions had broader training and kept multiple “career streams” open even as they pursued a primary specialty. They “traveled on an eight-lane highway,” he wrote, rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. They employed what Hogarth called a “circuit breaker.” They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination toward a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.
Pretending the world is like golf and chess is comforting. It makes for a tidy kind-world message, and some very compelling books. The rest of this one will begin where those end—in a place where the popular sport is Martian tennis, with a view into how the modern world became so wicked in the first place.
CHAPTER 2
How the Wicked World Was Made
THE TOWN OF DUNEDIN sits at the base of a hilly peninsula that juts off of New Zealand’s South Island into the South Pacific. The peninsula is famous for yellow-eyed penguins, and Dunedin boasts, demurely, the world’s steepest residential street. It also features the University of Otago, the oldest university in New Zealand, and home to James Flynn, a professor of political studies who changed how psychologists think about thinking.
He started in 1981, intrigued by a thirty-year-old paper that reported IQ test scores of American soldiers in World Wars I and II. The World War II soldiers had performed better, by a lot. A World War I soldier who scored smack in the middle of his peers—the 50th percentile—would have made only the 22nd percentile compared to soldiers in World War II. Flynn wondered if perhaps civilians had experienced a similar improvement. “I thought, if IQ gains had occurred anywhere,” he told me, “maybe they had occurred everywhere.” If he was right, psychologists had been missing something big right before their eyes.
Flynn wrote to researchers in other countries asking for data, and on a dull November Saturday in 1984, he found a letter in his university mailbox. It was from a Dutch researcher, and it contained years of raw data from IQ tests given to young men in the Netherlands. The data were from a test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, designed to gauge the test taker’s ability to make sense of complexity. Each question of the test shows a set of abstract designs with one design missing. The test taker must try to fill in the missing design to complete a pattern. Raven’s was conceived to be the epitome of a “culturally reduced” test; performance should be unaffected by material learned in life, inside or outside of school. Should Martians alight on Earth, Raven’s should be the test capable of determining how bright they are. And yet Flynn could immediately see that young Dutchmen had made enormous gains from one generation to the next.
Flynn found more clues in test reference manuals. IQ tests are all standardized so that the average score is always 100 points. (They are graded based on a curve, with 100 in the middle.) Flynn noticed that the tests had to be restandardized from time to time to keep the average at 100, because test takers were giving more correct answers than they had in the past. In the twelve months after he received the Dutch letter, Flynn collected data from fourteen countries. Every single one showed huge gains for both children and adults. “Our advantage over our ancestors,” as he put it, is “from the cradle to the grave.”
Flynn had asked the right question. Score gains had occurred everywhere. Other academics had stumbled upon pieces of the same data earlier, but none had investigated whether it was part of a global pattern, even those who were having to tweak the test scoring system to keep the average at 100. “As an outsider,” Flynn told me, “things strike me as surprising that I think people trained in psychometrics just accepted.”
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The Flynn effect—the increase in correct IQ test answers with each new generation in the twentieth century—has now been documented in more than thirty countries. The gains are startling: three points every ten years. To put that in perspective, if an adult who scored average today were compared to adults a century ago, she would be in the 98th percentile.
When Flynn published his revelation in 1987, it hit the community of researchers who study cognitive ability like a firebomb. The American Psychological Association convened an entire meeting on the issue, and psychologists invested in the immutable nature of IQ test scores offered an array of explanations to usher the effect away, from more education and better nutrition—which presumably contributed—to test-taking experience, but none fit the unusual pattern of score improvements. On tests that gauged material picked up in school or with independent reading or study—general knowledge, arithmetic, vocabulary—scores hardly budged. Meanwhile, performance on more abstract tasks that are never formally taught, like the Raven’s matrices, or “similarities” tests, which require a description of how two things are alike, skyrocketed.
A young person today asked to give similarities between “dusk” and “dawn” might immediately realize that both connote times of day. But they would be far more likely than their grandmothers to produce a higher-level similarity: both separate day from night. A child today who scores average on similarities would be in the 94th percentile of her grandparents’ generation. When a group of Estonian researchers used national test scores to compare word understandings of schoolkids in the 1930s to those in 2006, they saw that improvement came very specifically on the most abstract words. The more abstract the word, the bigger the improvement. The kids barely bested their grandparents on words for directly observable objects or phenomena (“hen,” “eating,” “illness”), but they improved massively on imperceptible concepts (“law,” “pledge,” “citizen”).
The gains around the world on Raven’s Progressive Matrices—where change was least expected—were the biggest of all. “The huge Raven’s gains show that today’s children are far better at solving problems on the spot without a previously learned method for doing so,” Flynn concluded. They are more able to extract rules and patterns where none are given. Even in countries that have recently had a decrease in verbal and math IQ test scores, Raven’s scores went up. The cause, it seemed, was some ineffable thing in modern air. Not only that, but the mystery air additive somehow supercharged modern brains specifically for the most abstract tests. What manner of change, Flynn wondered, could be at once so large and yet so particular?