Human Intelligence and Medical Illness Assessing the Flynn Effect
There’s little doubt that people are growing smarter. This effect is so strong that IQ tests must be renormed periodically to prevent classifying an overabundance of people as geniuses. The question is why is this collective rise in IQ – known as the Flyn
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Series Editors Donald H. Saklofske, Ph.D. Division of Applied Psychology University of Calgary, Canada Moshe Zeidner, Ph.D. Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Emotions Department of Human Development and Counseling Haifa University, Israel
For other titles published in this series, go to www.springer.com/series/6450
R. Grant Steen
Human Intelligence and Medical Illness Assessing the Flynn Effect
R. Grant Steen Medical Communications Consultants, LLC 103 Van Doren Place Chapel Hill, NC 27517 USA [email protected]
ISSN 1572-5642 ISBN 978-1-4419-0091-3 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-0092-0 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-0092-0 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2009929164 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
To Ralph O. Steen, My father and earliest intellectual guide; To Raymond K. Mulhern, A good friend and valued mentor; To Donald O. Hebb, The finest professor I’ve ever had.
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Preface
As critics will note, psychometric tests are deeply flawed. Person-to-person differences in performance on a psychometric test are not informative about many things of great interest. An intelligence quotient (IQ) cannot characterize creativity or wisdom or artistic ability or other forms of specialized knowledge. An IQ test is simply an effort to assess an aptitude for success in the modern world, and individual scores do a mediocre job of predicting individual successes. In the early days of psychology, tests of intelligence were cobbled together with little thought as to validity; instead, the socially powerful sought to validate their power and the prominent to rationalize their success. In recent years, we have obviated many of the objections to IQ that were so forcefully noted by Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man. Nevertheless, IQ tests are still flawed and those flaws are hereby acknowledged in principle. Yet, in the analysis that follows, individual IQ test scores are not used; rather, average IQ scores are employed. In many cases – though not all – an average IQ is calculated from a truly enormous sample of people. The most common circumstance for such large-scale IQ testing is an effort to systematically sample all men of a certain age, to assess
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