Flynn Attributes Century of IQ Gains to Abstract Tools, Not Brainpower

Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents' | James Flynn — TED

TED

Surging intelligence test scores reflect societal adoption of abstract classification and hypothetical reasoning rather than innate biological evolution, though cognitive sophistication still fails in politics without historical knowledge.

AI-assisted summary of Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents' | James Flynn — original source. Check the original for full context.

Source published: 2013-09-26

Key ideas

Rising twentieth-century IQ scores reflect a societal shift toward new mental habits—such as classification, abstraction, and hypothetical thinking—rather than an increase in innate biological brainpower. (0:12)
The proportion of the American workforce employed in cognitively demanding professions surged from just 3% in 1900 to 35% in the modern era. (6:52)
Gains in abstract reasoning have significantly enhanced moral debate and civil rights discourse by enabling people to take hypothetical empathy tests and universal ethical principles seriously. (11:07)
Despite dramatic cognitive gains, political judgment remains impaired because modern populations increasingly suffer from historical amnesia and a lack of international context. (16:03)

Detailed notes

## Background Published on YouTube by the TED channel on September 26, 2013, this talk features moral philosopher James Flynn exploring 20th-century cognitive history. The presentation examines how the proportion of Americans in cognitively demanding professions surged from 3% in 1900 to 35% today, tracing the surprising consequences of our newly developed mental flexibility.

## TL;DR James Flynn investigates the massive generational surge in IQ scores over the 20th century, arguing that this rise reflects upgraded 'mental artillery'—such as abstract classification, hypotheticals, and logical deduction—rather than greater innate biological intelligence. Contrasting pre-scientific peasant mindsets with the demands of modern education and complex professions, he illustrates how everyday thinking detached from immediate concrete utility. Flynn explains that while these cognitive habits enhanced moral reasoning and empathy through universal principles, abstract logic alone cannot compensate for historical amnesia in contemporary politics. Ultimately, he concludes that this cognitive evolution reveals the extraordinary, previously untapped intellectual reserves inherent in ordinary people.

## Atmosphere & style Flynn presents with an intellectually brisk, engaging, and dryly witty lecturing style that effortlessly balances psychometric data with vivid, relatable parables. The narrative carries the listener through lighthearted thought experiments involving Martian archaeologists and bewildered Russian peasants before pivoting into a sobering, urgent critique of foreign policy blunders and civic ignorance. The talk evokes a compelling blend of philosophical curiosity and democratic egalitarianism, leaving the audience feeling both intellectually enlightened and morally challenged.

## Bulletin - [00:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=12s) Rising twentieth-century IQ scores reflect a societal shift toward new mental habits—such as classification, abstraction, and hypothetical thinking—rather than an increase in innate biological brainpower. - [06:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=412s) The proportion of the American workforce employed in cognitively demanding professions surged from just 3% in 1900 to 35% in the modern era. - [11:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=667s) Gains in abstract reasoning have significantly enhanced moral debate and civil rights discourse by enabling people to take hypothetical empathy tests and universal ethical principles seriously. - [16:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=963s) Despite dramatic cognitive gains, political judgment remains impaired because modern populations increasingly suffer from historical amnesia and a lack of international context.

## Key takeaways - [00:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=12s) Evaluating century-old test takers by modern standards produces an average IQ of 70, whereas scoring modern individuals against 1900 norms yields an average of 130. - [02:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=137s) The Martian archaeologist analogy shows that rising IQ scores mirror technological leaps in weaponry, demonstrating better 'mental artillery' rather than improved innate physiology. - [03:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=234s) Interviews by Alexander Luria reveal that pre-scientific minds resisted abstract categories and hypotheticals, interpreting problems strictly through direct, utilitarian experience. - [06:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=412s) Schooling expanded from basic rote memorization in the early 1900s to compulsory education emphasizing deduction, classification, and hypothetical problem-solving. - [06:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=412s) The modernization of occupations—spanning agriculture, medicine, and banking—demanded an unprecedented degree of cognitive flexibility from ordinary workers. - [12:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=723s) Constructing meaningful moral arguments depends heavily on the ability to entertain hypothetical scenarios, which older, concrete-minded generations often rejected outright. - [12:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=723s) When moral rules are framed as universal principles rendered consistent by logic, biases can be isolated as empirical claims and debunked by real-world evidence. - [14:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=873s) IQ test gains over the twentieth century are heavily concentrated in abstract subtests like Wechsler Similarities and Raven's Progressive Matrices rather than across all faculties evenly. - [16:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=963s) Abstract logic does not equate to political wisdom; without knowledge of history and international affairs, modern citizens remain trapped in a superficial present. - [16:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=963s) A lack of historical grounding makes societies susceptible to repeated foreign policy errors and historical falsehoods surrounding major military conflicts. - [17:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=1066s) The dramatic rise in IQ scores disproved long-held aristocratic assumptions that ordinary people lacked the biological capacity for high-level abstract thought.

## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=12s) The Cognitive Evolution of the 20th Century

Over the course of the twentieth century, human minds underwent a transformation as dramatic as the physical evolution of the automobile. Just as early 1900s automobiles changed fundamentally because of technological progress and improved roads, human cognition shifted from operating in a purely concrete environment to navigating an intensely complex landscape. In earlier eras, people analyzed the world almost entirely through immediate personal utility—asking how an object or situation could directly benefit them. Today, confronting an intricate modern reality requires an entirely new set of mental habits: clothing the concrete world in categories and classification, formulating logically consistent abstractions, and taking hypothetical scenarios seriously by imagining what might be rather than focusing exclusively on what is.

James Flynn explains that this massive psychological pivot first surfaced through the dramatic, compounding escalation of IQ scores across generations. Rather than simply getting a few additional questions right, successive generations have consistently outscored their predecessors back to the dawn of intelligence testing. This creates a profound statistical paradox: if people from a century ago were scored using modern norms, their average IQ would be just 70, which is the traditional clinical threshold for mental retardation. Conversely, if modern individuals were evaluated against the norms of 1900, the contemporary average IQ would be 130, which marks the conventional cutoff for giftedness. Flynn dismisses both naive interpretations—that our grandparents were cognitively impaired or that modern citizens are uniformly geniuses—and proposes a third, far more illuminating perspective.

Flynn encapsulates this transformation: “We've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world, and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind.”

- **IQ score comparison across centuries**: - Scoring people from a century ago against modern norms yields an average IQ of 70 (the clinical cutoff for intellectual disability). - Scoring modern people against century-old norms yields an average IQ of 130 (the threshold for giftedness).

---

[02:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=137s) The Martian Archaeologist and Changing Mental Artillery

To illustrate what truly changed over the twentieth century, Flynn offers an analogy featuring an extraterrestrial archaeologist arriving on Earth to study the ruins of human civilization. While examining old shooting range targets, the Martian discovers that in 1865, human marksmen were only able to hit a single bullseye per minute. By 1898, target scores increased to five bullseyes per minute, and by 1918, shooters were landing a hundred bullseyes in sixty seconds. Initially, the alien archaeologist would be utterly baffled, assuming target tests were designed to measure innate physiological traits like hand steadiness, keenness of vision, and weapon control.

The mystery vanishes once the archaeologist examines the physical battlefields: soldiers in the American Civil War carried single-shot muskets, forces in the Spanish-American War wielded repeating rifles, and World War I troops operated machine guns. The escalating target scores did not reflect a sudden surge in human biological visual acuity or neuromuscular control; they reflected rapid advances in weapon technology. In precisely the same way, the surging scores on twentieth-century intelligence tests do not mean humans evolved greater innate brainpower overnight. Instead, society equipped average minds with powerful new "mental artillery" to dissect the world.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Evolution of Firepower Analogy accDescr: Diagram showing how technological equipment evolved alongside target performance between 1865 and 1918.

subgraph FirepowerEvolution["The Equipment Hypothesis"] direction TB M["1865: Muskets (Civil War era)"] -->|"1 bullseye / min"| R["1898: Repeating Rifles (Spanish-American War)"] R -->|"5 bullseyes / min"| MG["1918: Machine Guns (World War I)"] MG -->|"100 bullseyes / min"| C["Modern Performance"] end

subgraph CognitiveParallel["The Cognitive Parallel"] direction TB CA["Concrete, utilitarian thinking"] --> MA["Upgraded 'Mental Artillery': Classification, Abstractions & Hypotheses"] end

FirepowerEvolution -.->|"Parallels"| CognitiveParallel ```

As Flynn emphasizes regarding the Martian's ultimate realization: “In other words, it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand.”

---

[03:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=234s) Luria’s Interviews with Pre-Scientific Minds

To demonstrate what human thought looked like before the scientific age took hold, Flynn turns to the field research of Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria. Luria interviewed rural Russian peasants who had received only minimal schooling—around four years, which was typical for the general population in 1900. Luria found that these individuals exhibited an intense resistance to abstract classification, categorically refused to speculate about hypothetical premises, and struggled to apply logical deductions to abstract categories. They continually broke the world down into concrete, utilitarian pieces grounded solely in direct sensory experience.

Flynn recounts three specific interviews conducted by Luria to showcase this mindset: - **Crows and fish**: When asked what a crow and a fish have in common, a rural village headman insisted they shared absolutely nothing: one can eat a fish but cannot eat a crow, and while a crow can peck at a fish, a fish can do nothing to a crow. When Luria pressed, asking if they were not both animals, the man replied, “Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird,” evaluating them strictly on what could be practically done with each animal. - **Camels in Germany**: When Luria presented the syllogism, *"There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?"* the respondent reasoned that if Hamburg were large enough, there surely ought to be camels there. When asked what the stated words implied, the man guessed that perhaps Hamburg was simply a tiny village without enough room for camels. He refused to entertain the premise as a formal, self-contained hypothetical problem. - **Bears at the North Pole**: Luria stated, *"At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?"* The peasant flatly replied that such matters could only be settled by eyewitness testimony, noting that if a wise person returned from the North Pole and testified they were white, he might consider believing it, but every bear he had ever seen in his life was brown.

Ultimately, these pre-scientific thinkers rejected abstract exercises as pointless distractions from practical life. Flynn highlights their exasperation through one peasant's direct objection: “How can we solve things that aren't real problems?”

---

[06:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=412s) Real-World Shifts: Education and the Rise of Cognitively Demanding Jobs

These cognitive tools—classification, logical analysis of abstractions, and taking hypotheticals seriously—have reshaped institutions far beyond psychological testing rooms. Formal schooling has lengthened dramatically, expanding from the four to eight years typical in the early twentieth century to twelve years of compulsory high school education today, with 52 percent of Americans going on to experience tertiary education. Furthermore, the core pedagogy has changed. Science education requires constant classification, hypothetical modeling, and logical consistency, and that shift filtered all the way down into primary and secondary curricula.

To prove this pedagogical evolution, Flynn contrasts standardized eighth-grade examinations administered to 14-year-olds in Ohio across eighty years. In 1910, exams tested exclusively for socially valued, concrete, memorized facts—such as recalling the capital cities of the 44 or 45 American states that existed at the time. By 1990, the Ohio examinations had eliminated simple rote recall in favor of abstract social analysis, asking questions such as why the largest city in a state is rarely its capital. Students were expected to deduce the underlying political dynamics: rural-dominated state legislatures distrusted metropolitan centers, deliberately placing state capitals in smaller county seats like Albany instead of New York City, or Harrisburg instead of Philadelphia.

A parallel revolution transformed the workplace, shifting from manual labor to cognitively demanding professions and upgrading existing jobs:

Flynn summarizes the economic imperative driving these changes: “We can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible.”

---

[11:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=667s) The Unexpected Impact on Moral Debate

Flynn notes that while he spends time examining cognitive psychology, his primary vocation is that of a moral philosopher, which makes him particularly attuned to how these cognitive shifts have fundamentally transformed public and private moral reasoning. Over the past century, moral discourse in developed societies like the United States has escalated and matured precisely because modern citizens have learned to embrace hypotheticals, respect universal principles, and apply consistent logical connections to ethical dilemmas.

This intellectual shift became acutely apparent in the mid-1950s. Flynn recalls returning home from university in 1955, at the dawn of the Martin Luther King Jr. era and the modern civil rights movement. College students across the country returned to their households and found themselves locked in intense arguments with their parents and grandparents. Flynn recalls his own father, who was born in 1885 and held typical mild racial biases, alongside an intense hatred of the English rooted in his Irish background, setting the stage for generational clashes over universal human equality.

As Flynn explains this ethical awakening: “Now over the last century, in developed nations like America, moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously, and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections.”

[12:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=723s) The Concrete Mindset and the Power of Hypothetical Moral Reasoning

Earlier generations inhabited a concrete intellectual world where social attitudes were treated as immutable facts rather than negotiable ideas. James Flynn recalls that while an older relative held deep racial prejudices, proposing a hypothetical test of empathy—asking how he would feel if he woke up black tomorrow morning—was dismissed as absolute nonsense: who had ever heard of a person going to bed and waking up with a different skin color? Because older generations were anchored in inherited mores, they refused to entertain hypothetical scenarios. Without the ability to take a hypothetical seriously, Flynn argues, constructing a meaningful moral debate becomes nearly impossible. Empathy across lines of difference requires asking how one would feel if their family in Iran suffered collateral damage despite having done no wrong, yet a mind bound to the concrete simply retorts that their own government looks after them and foreign governments should do the same.

Flynn points to traditional honor cultures as another manifestation of treating customs as physical, unmovable objects. An Islamic father who feels honor-bound to murder his daughter after she has been raped is treating his social codes like inherited “sticks and stones and rocks” that cannot be bent by logic. When challenged with the counter-hypothetical of whether he would deserve execution if he were knocked unconscious and violated, such a thinker rejects the question outright because it does not exist in the Koran. Modern minds, by contrast, state moral principles as universal abstractions and test them through logical consistency.

If society embraces the abstract principle that no person should suffer unless they are guilty of wrongdoing, excluding black people requires carving out an explicit exception—claiming, for example, that black skin carries an inherent moral taint. Once framed as an empirical claim rather than an untouchable dogma, it can be tested and debunked by evidence: figures like Saint Augustine and Thomas Sowell demonstrate that such generalizations fail. As Flynn explains, moral progress depends entirely on this transition: “You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic.”

[14:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=873s) Cognitive History on IQ Tests: From Concrete Objects to Pure Abstraction

This transformation in everyday reasoning mirrors the specific areas where modern test-takers have registered massive gains on standard intelligence tests. Flynn explains that his research into cognitive history began when psychometric data revealed that score improvements over the twentieth century were not evenly spread across all cognitive faculties. Instead, they spiked dramatically on tests assessing classification and abstract logic, most notably the Similarities subtest of the Wechsler Intelligence Scales and the analogical reasoning tasks of Raven’s Progressive Matrices.

The evolution of how test-takers solve analogies illustrates how profoundly the human mind has detached from concrete reality over successive generations:

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Evolution of Analogical Reasoning on IQ Tests accDescr: Three stages from 1900 to 2010 showing the shift from concrete physical analogies to geometric relationships and pure symbolic abstraction.

subgraph S1["1900: Concrete World"] A["Cats are like wildcats; dogs are like wolves."] end

subgraph S2["1960: Geometric Abstraction"] B["Two squares to a triangle; two circles to a semicircle."] end

subgraph S3["2010: Pure Symbolic Logic"] C["Two circles to a semicircle; two sixteens to eight."] end

S1 --> S2 --> S3 ```

In 1900, subjects could solve simple, tangible analogies based on direct real-world experience, answering that if cats are like wildcats, dogs are like wolves. By 1960, subjects could process formal visual abstractions on Raven's Progressive Matrices: if two squares are followed by a triangle (which represents half of a square), they deduced that two circles are followed by a semicircle. By 2010, college graduates could leap across representational domains entirely; given two circles followed by a semicircle, they deduced that two sixteens should be followed by eight, recognizing the underlying concept of halving across geometric shapes and Arabic numerals alike. Reflecting on this cognitive shift, Flynn observes: “That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question.”

[16:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=963s) The Ahistorical Bubble: Why Abstract Logic Fails Politics

Despite these remarkable advances in scientific classification and logical abstraction, Flynn highlights a deeply disheartening failure: cognitive sophistication does not automatically translate into political wisdom. Operating effectively in politics demands not only moral universalism and abstract reasoning, but also a thorough knowledge of history and global affairs. Without historical grounding, modern minds remain trapped in what Flynn describes as a superficial present. Young Americans read less history, literature, and international news, leaving them unable to distinguish the Korean War from the Vietnam War or identify America’s allies during the Second World War.

To illustrate the perils of historical amnesia, Flynn notes how differently the public might respond to foreign intervention if they recognized that the modern campaign in Afghanistan marked the fifth time Western armies had invaded to set the country in order—and that on the previous four occasions, the foreign forces withdrew leaving scarcely a trace in the sand. A basic familiarity with historical records would also reveal that the public was misled into four of the nation's last six major wars: - The sinking of the USS *Maine* was not carried out by the Spanish. - The *Lusitania* was not an innocent civilian vessel, but carried munitions. - The North Vietnamese did not attack the American Seventh Fleet in the Gulf of Tonkin incident. - Saddam Hussein despised al-Qaeda and had no operational ties to the group, yet the administration persuaded 45 percent of the American populace that they were partners in crime when Saddam would have hung them from the nearest lamppost.

Flynn delivers a sharp warning about the limits of intelligence in the absence of context: “One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, you can't do politics.”

[17:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=1066s) Untapped Cognitive Reserves and Shared Human Potential

Flynn concludes by rejecting outright pessimism, noting that the twentieth century demonstrated the profound, previously unrecognized cognitive reserves inherent in ordinary citizens. For centuries, aristocratic elites operated under the conviction that the masses lacked the intellectual capacity to master abstract thought or participate in elite intellectual life. To show the depth of this class prejudice, Flynn recalls Lord Curzon watching working-class bathers in the North Sea and remarking in bewilderment, “Why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have?”—speaking of them as if discovering a completely different biological species.

The twentieth-century explosion in IQ scores disproved this aristocratic arrogance, confirming that the cognitive capabilities of ordinary people merely needed the right cultural and educational conditions to flourish. Flynn declares: “The 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized, and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person couldn't make it, that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities.” Closing to warm applause, Flynn invokes Rudyard Kipling's famous line, affirming that human potential is universally distributed across all walks of life: “The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters underneath the skin.”

## Notable quotes > [06:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=412s) We can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible. — James Flynn

> [16:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=963s) You can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, you can't do politics. — James Flynn

> [11:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI&t=667s) Over the last century, in developed nations like America, moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously, and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections. — James Flynn

## Mentioned James Flynn, Alexander Luria, Martin Luther King Jr., Saint Augustine, Thomas Sowell, Lord Curzon, Rudyard Kipling, Saddam Hussein, Wechsler Intelligence Scales, Raven’s Progressive Matrices, USS Maine, Lusitania

## Video description In 1900, only 3% of Americans practiced professions that were deemed "cognitively demanding." Today, 35% of us do, and we have all learned to be flexible in the way that we think about problems. In this fascinating and fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn makes the case that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.

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[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vpqilhW9uI)

中文简报

弗林将一个世纪以来的智商增长归因于抽象思维工具而非脑力提升智商测试分数的激增反映了社会对抽象分类和假设推理的采用，而非先天的生物进化；然而，若缺乏历史知识，认知水平的提升仍无法改善政治判断。詹姆斯·弗林研究了20世纪各代人智商测试分数的巨大激增，认为这一增长反映了诸如抽象分类、假设推理和逻辑演绎等“思维武器”的升级，而非更强的先天生物智力。通过将前科学时代的农民思维与现代教育及复杂职业的需求进行对比，他阐释了日常思维是如何脱离直接的具体实用性的。弗林解释说，尽管这些认知习惯通过普遍原则增强了道德推理能力与同理心，但单凭抽象逻辑无法弥补当代政治中的历史失忆。他最终得出结论，这种认知演变揭示了普通人内在具有的非凡且此前尚未被开发的智力潜能。 20世纪智商分数的上升反映了整个社会向分类、抽象和假设思维等新思维习惯的转变，而非先天生物脑力的提升。 (0:12) 从事认知要求较高职业的美国劳动力比例从1900年的仅3%飙升至现代的35%。 (6:52) 抽象推理能力的提升显著促进了道德辩论和公民权利讨论，使人们能够认真对待假设性的同理心测试和普遍伦理原则。 (11:07) 尽管认知能力取得了显著进步，但由于现代群体日益缺乏历史记忆与国际背景知识，其政治判断力依然受损。 (16:03)

Source quotes

[6:52] James Flynn: We can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible. [16:03] James Flynn: You can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, you can't do politics. [11:07] James Flynn: Over the last century, in developed nations like America, moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously, and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections.

Original transcript

[0:12] We are going to take a quick voyage [0:15] over the cognitive history of the 20th century, [0:18] because during that century, [0:20] our minds have altered dramatically. [0:23] As you all know, the cars that people drove in 1900 [0:26] have altered because the roads are better [0:28] and because of technology. [0:31] And our minds have altered, too. [0:33] We've gone from people who confronted a concrete world [0:37] and analyzed that world primarily in terms [0:40] of how much it would benefit them [0:42] to people who confront a very complex world, [0:47] and it's a world where we've had to develop [0:49] new mental habits, new habits of mind. [0:52] And these include things like [0:54] clothing that concrete world with classification, [0:59] introducing abstractions that we try to make [1:01] logically consistent, [1:04] and also taking the hypothetical seriously, [1:06] that is, wondering about what might have been [1:09] rather than what is. [1:11] Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention [1:15] through massive I.Q. gains over time, [1:18] and these have been truly massive. [1:21] That is, we don't just get a few more questions right [1:25] on I.Q. tests. [1:27] We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests [1:30] than each succeeding generation [1:32] back to the time that they were invented. [1:35] Indeed, if you score the people a century ago [1:39] against modern norms, [1:40] they would have an average I.Q. of 70. [1:43] If you score us against their norms, [1:46] we would have an average I.Q. of 130. [1:50] Now this has raised all sorts of questions. [1:53] Were our immediate ancestors [1:55] on the verge of mental retardation? [1:58] Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation. [2:02] Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? [2:05] Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness. [2:10] Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative [2:13] that's much more illuminating than either of those, [2:17] and to put this into perspective, [2:19] let's imagine that a Martian came down to Earth [2:22] and found a ruined civilization. [2:25] And this Martian was an archaeologist, [2:28] and they found scores, target scores, [2:30] that people had used for shooting. [2:33] And first they looked at 1865, [2:36] and they found that in a minute, [2:38] people had only put one bullet in the bullseye. [2:42] And then they found, in 1898, [2:44] that they'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute. [2:48] And then about 1918 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye. [2:53] And initially, that archaeologist would be baffled. [2:57] They would say, look, these tests were designed [2:59] to find out how much people were steady of hand, [3:03] how keen their eyesight was, [3:06] whether they had control of their weapon. [3:08] How could these performances have escalated [3:11] to this enormous degree? [3:13] Well we now know, of course, the answer. [3:16] If that Martian looked at battlefields, [3:18] they would find that people had only muskets [3:21] at the time of the Civil War [3:23] and that they had repeating rifles [3:25] at the time of the Spanish-American War, [3:28] and then they had machine guns [3:30] by the time of World War I. [3:33] And, in other words, it was the equipment [3:35] that was in the hands of the average soldier [3:38] that was responsible, not greater keenness of eye [3:41] or steadiness of hand. [3:43] Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery [3:46] that we have picked up over those hundred years, [3:50] and I think again that another thinker will help us here, [3:54] and that's Luria. [3:56] Luria looked at people [3:58] just before they entered the scientific age, [4:02] and he found that these people [4:04] were resistant to classifying the concrete world. [4:07] They wanted to break it up [4:08] into little bits that they could use. [4:11] He found that they were resistant [4:13] to deducing the hypothetical, [4:17] to speculating about what might be, [4:19] and he found finally that they didn't deal well [4:22] with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions. [4:26] Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. [4:30] He talked to the head man of a person [4:32] in rural Russia. [4:34] They'd only had, as people had in 1900, [4:36] about four years of schooling. [4:38] And he asked that particular person, [4:41] what do crows and fish have in common? [4:44] And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. [4:47] You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. [4:50] A crow can peck at a fish. [4:53] A fish can't do anything to a crow." [4:56] And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" [4:59] And he said, "Of course not. [5:00] One's a fish. [5:02] The other is a bird." [5:04] And he was interested, effectively, [5:06] in what he could do with those concrete objects. [5:10] And then Luria went to another person, [5:12] and he said to them, [5:15] "There are no camels in Germany. [5:17] Hamburg is a city in Germany. [5:20] Are there camels in Hamburg?" [5:22] And the fellow said, [5:23] "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." [5:27] And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" [5:31] And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, [5:34] and there's no room for camels." [5:36] In other words, he was unwilling to treat this [5:38] as anything but a concrete problem, [5:41] and he was used to camels being in villages, [5:44] and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, [5:48] to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany. [5:53] A third interview was conducted [5:55] with someone about the North Pole. [5:58] And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. [6:03] Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. [6:06] What color are the bears at the North Pole?" [6:10] And the response was, "Such a thing [6:12] is to be settled by testimony. [6:14] If a wise person came from the North Pole [6:17] and told me the bears were white, [6:19] I might believe him, [6:21] but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." [6:25] Now you see again, this person has rejected [6:28] going beyond the concrete world [6:30] and analyzing it through everyday experience, [6:33] and it was important to that person [6:35] what color bears were -- [6:37] that is, they had to hunt bears. [6:39] They weren't willing to engage in this. [6:41] One of them said to Luria, [6:43] "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? [6:47] None of these problems are real. [6:49] How can we address them?" [6:51] Now, these three categories -- [6:55] classification, [6:56] using logic on abstractions, [6:58] taking the hypothetical seriously -- [7:01] how much difference do they make in the real world [7:04] beyond the testing room? [7:05] And let me give you a few illustrations. [7:08] First, almost all of us today get a high school diploma. [7:12] That is, we've gone from four to eight years of education [7:15] to 12 years of formal education, [7:18] and 52 percent of Americans [7:20] have actually experienced some type of tertiary education. [7:24] Now, not only do we have much more education, [7:28] and much of that education is scientific, [7:30] and you can't do science without classifying the world. [7:34] You can't do science without proposing hypotheses. [7:38] You can't do science without making it logically consistent. [7:42] And even down in grade school, things have changed. [7:46] In 1910, they looked at the examinations [7:49] that the state of Ohio gave to 14-year-olds, [7:53] and they found that they were all [7:55] for socially valued concrete information. [7:58] They were things like, [7:59] what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states [8:02] that existed at that time? [8:05] When they looked at the exams [8:06] that the state of Ohio gave in 1990, [8:09] they were all about abstractions. [8:12] They were things like, [8:13] why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital? [8:19] And you were supposed to think, well, [8:20] the state legislature was rural-controlled, [8:23] and they hated the big city, [8:25] so rather than putting the capital in a big city, [8:28] they put it in a county seat. [8:29] They put it in Albany rather than New York. [8:32] They put it in Harrisburg rather than Philadelphia. [8:35] And so forth. [8:37] So the tenor of education has changed. [8:40] We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, [8:44] to use abstractions, and to link them logically. [8:47] What about employment? [8:50] Well, in 1900, three percent of Americans [8:53] practiced professions that were cognitively demanding. [8:57] Only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers. [9:01] Today, 35 percent of Americans [9:04] practice cognitively demanding professions, [9:07] not only to the professions proper like lawyer [9:10] or doctor or scientist or lecturer, [9:12] but many, many sub-professions [9:14] having to do with being a technician, [9:16] a computer programmer. [9:18] A whole range of professions now make cognitive demands. [9:23] And we can only meet the terms of employment [9:25] in the modern world by being cognitively [9:28] far more flexible. [9:30] And it's not just that we have many more people [9:33] in cognitively demanding professions. [9:36] The professions have been upgraded. [9:39] Compare the doctor in 1900, [9:41] who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve, [9:44] with the modern general practitioner or specialist, [9:47] with years of scientific training. [9:49] Compare the banker in 1900, [9:52] who really just needed a good accountant [9:54] and to know who was trustworthy in the local community [9:57] for paying back their mortgage. [10:00] Well, the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees [10:03] may have been morally remiss, [10:05] but they were cognitively very agile. [10:08] They went far beyond that 1900 banker. [10:12] They had to look at computer projections [10:15] for the housing market. [10:17] They had to get complicated CDO-squared [10:20] in order to bundle debt together [10:23] and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset. [10:27] They had to prepare a case to get rating agencies [10:30] to give it a AAA, [10:31] though in many cases, they had virtually bribed the rating agencies. [10:35] And they also, of course, had to get people [10:37] to accept these so-called assets [10:40] and pay money for them [10:41] even though they were highly vulnerable. [10:44] Or take a farmer today. [10:46] I take the farm manager of today as very different [10:49] from the farmer of 1900. [10:51] So it hasn't just been the spread [10:53] of cognitively demanding professions. [10:56] It's also been the upgrading of tasks [10:59] like lawyer and doctor and what have you [11:01] that have made demands on our cognitive faculties. [11:05] But I've talked about education and employment. [11:08] Some of the habits of mind that we have developed [11:12] over the 20th century [11:13] have paid off in unexpected areas. [11:16] I'm primarily a moral philosopher. [11:18] I merely have a holiday in psychology, [11:22] and what interests me in general is moral debate. [11:26] Now over the last century, [11:29] in developed nations like America, [11:31] moral debate has escalated [11:33] because we take the hypothetical seriously, [11:36] and we also take universals seriously [11:40] and look for logical connections. [11:43] When I came home in 1955 from university [11:46] at the time of Martin Luther King, [11:49] a lot of people came home at that time [11:51] and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents. [11:55] My father was born in 1885, [11:58] and he was mildly racially biased. [12:00] As an Irishman, he hated the English so much [12:03] he didn't have much emotion for anyone else. [12:05] (Laughter) [12:08] But he did have a sense that black people were inferior. [12:13] And when we said to our parents and grandparents, [12:15] "How would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black?" [12:20] they said that is the dumbest thing you've ever said. [12:24] Who have you ever known who woke up in the morning -- [12:26] (Laughter) -- [12:28] that turned black? [12:30] In other words, they were fixed in the concrete [12:33] mores and attitudes they had inherited. [12:37] They would not take the hypothetical seriously, [12:40] and without the hypothetical, [12:41] it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground. [12:45] You have to say, imagine you were [12:48] in Iran, and imagine that your relatives [12:53] all suffered from collateral damage [12:56] even though they had done no wrong. [12:58] How would you feel about that? [13:00] And if someone of the older generation says, [13:03] well, our government takes care of us, [13:05] and it's up to their government to take care of them, [13:08] they're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously. [13:12] Or take an Islamic father whose daughter has been raped, [13:15] and he feels he's honor-bound to kill her. [13:18] Well, he's treating his mores [13:21] as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited, [13:25] and they're unmovable in any way by logic. [13:27] They're just inherited mores. [13:30] Today we would say something like, [13:32] well, imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized. [13:36] Would you deserve to be killed? [13:37] And he would say, well that's not in the Koran. [13:40] That's not one of the principles I've got. [13:44] Well you, today, universalize your principles. [13:47] You state them as abstractions and you use logic on them. [13:51] If you have a principle such as, [13:53] people shouldn't suffer unless they're guilty of something, [13:57] then to exclude black people [13:59] you've got to make exceptions, don't you? [14:01] You have to say, well, blackness of skin, [14:04] you couldn't suffer just for that. [14:07] It must be that blacks are somehow tainted. [14:10] And then we can bring empirical evidence to bear, can't we, [14:13] and say, well how can you consider all blacks tainted [14:16] when St. Augustine was black and Thomas Sowell is black. [14:20] And you can get moral argument off the ground, then, [14:23] because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. [14:28] You're treating them as universals, [14:30] to be rendered consistent by logic. [14:33] Now how did all of this arise out of I.Q. tests? [14:36] That's what initially got me going on cognitive history. [14:40] If you look at the I.Q. test, [14:42] you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas. [14:46] The similarities subtest of the Wechsler [14:48] is about classification, [14:51] and we have made enormous gains [14:53] on that classification subtest. [14:56] There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery [14:59] that are about using logic on abstractions. [15:02] Some of you may have taken Raven's Progressive Matrices, [15:06] and it's all about analogies. [15:08] And in 1900, people could do simple analogies. [15:12] That is, if you said to them, cats are like wildcats. [15:16] What are dogs like? [15:18] They would say wolves. [15:20] But by 1960, people could attack Raven's [15:23] on a much more sophisticated level. [15:26] If you said, we've got two squares followed by a triangle, [15:31] what follows two circles? [15:33] They could say a semicircle. [15:35] Just as a triangle is half of a square, [15:37] a semicircle is half of a circle. [15:40] By 2010, college graduates, if you said [15:44] two circles followed by a semicircle, [15:47] two sixteens followed by what, [15:50] they would say eight, because eight is half of 16. [15:53] That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world [15:56] that they could even ignore [15:59] the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question. [16:03] Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. [16:06] We haven't made progress on all fronts. [16:09] One of the ways in which we would like to deal [16:12] with the sophistication of the modern world [16:14] is through politics, [16:16] and sadly you can have humane moral principles, [16:19] you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, [16:24] and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, [16:27] you can't do politics. [16:29] We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, [16:32] that they read less history and less literature [16:35] and less material about foreign lands, [16:38] and they're essentially ahistorical. [16:39] They live in the bubble of the present. [16:42] They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. [16:44] They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. [16:49] Think how different America would be [16:51] if every American knew that this is the fifth time [16:55] Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, [16:59] and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened [17:02] on those four previous occasions. [17:05] (Laughter) [17:06] And that is, they had barely left, [17:08] and there wasn't a trace in the sand. [17:10] Or imagine how different things would be [17:13] if most Americans knew that we had been lied [17:16] into four of our last six wars. [17:19] You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, [17:22] the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel [17:24] but was loaded with munitions, [17:27] the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, [17:31] and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda [17:34] and had nothing to do with it, [17:36] and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people [17:40] that they were brothers in arms, [17:41] when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost. [17:45] But I don't want to end on a pessimistic note. [17:49] The 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves [17:53] in ordinary people that we have now realized, [17:57] and the aristocracy was convinced [17:59] that the average person couldn't make it, [18:01] that they could never share their mindset [18:04] or their cognitive abilities. [18:07] Lord Curzon once said [18:09] he saw people bathing in the North Sea, [18:11] and he said, "Why did no one tell me [18:12] what white bodies the lower orders have?" [18:15] As if they were a reptile. [18:18] Well, Dickens was right and he was wrong. [Correction: Rudyard Kipling] [18:21] [Kipling] said, "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady [18:25] are sisters underneath the skin." [18:28] (Applause)