James Robert Flynn (28 April 193411 December 2020) was an American-born New Zealand moral philosopher and intelligence researcher. Originally from Washington, D.C., and educated at the University of Chicago, Flynn emigrated to Dunedin in 1963, where he taught political studies at the University of Otago. He was noted for his publications about the continued year-after-year increase of IQ scores throughout the world, which is now referred to as the Flynn effect. In addition to his academic work, he championed social democratic politics throughout his life.
Early life and education
James Robert Flynn was born in an Irish-American community in Washington, D.C., on April 28, 1934. His parents were Irish-Americans from Missouri. His father, Joseph, left formal schooling at age 12 to work in a factory and later became a "hard-drinking" journalist and editor. Flynn described his father as a "keen reader" who took pride in completing the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen rather than pencil. Flynn's father read classical works to him at a young age, and Flynn said he was "surrounded by good literature" as a child. Flynn became an avid reader as well; later in life, he wrote a book about world literature, and in a 2010 commencement address, he encouraged graduates to learn by reading "works of great literature". His mother, Mae, was an office worker and homemaker who trained as a teacher. He had a brother, Joseph, who became a non-isothermal kinetics chemist.
Raised Roman Catholic, Flynn was a choir boy at Washington, D.C.'s Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle and attended the Catholic private schools St. Paul's Primary School and St. John's Academy. Flynn renounced his Catholic religion at age 12 after winning a full set of World Book Encyclopedia in a city-wide competition and reading about scientific explanations for the creation of the universe that contradicted his creationist education. He credited his rejection of Catholicism and his parents' racial views for forming his secular, socialist views on racial and social equality. Flynn described himself as an "atheist, a scientific realist, a social democrat".
Flynn was a lifelong competitive runner who ran for his high school and college and earned six US running medals over the course of his life.
In the 1950s, Flynn earned a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he originally intended to study pure mathematics or theoretical physics "because they seemed to pose the most difficult problems to solve", but ended up studying moral and political philosophy, a field with more practical applications. An "ardent democratic socialist" and "man of the left" throughout his life, Flynn joined the Socialist Party of America in college and, after graduating, became a civil rights activist. While working on his doctorate in politics and moral philosophy, he was political action co-chairman for the university branch of the NAACP, where he worked on its social housing initiatives. His doctorate dissertation was titled, "Ethics and the Modern Social Scientist."
He met his wife, an attorney whose family was active in the Communist Party USA, at a protest against segregation at Glen Echo Park in Maryland. He was 26 years old at the time, and she was 17. His wife said that Flynn "ticked the entire list of qualities I wanted in a husband and which I had written down in my diary at the age of 15": he was tall, smart, funny, held left-wing political views, could stand up to her mother, and had a job with a pension. She proposed to him three times: he declined the first two times due to her young age before accepting the third proposal. They named their eldest son, Oxford University maths professor Victor Flynn, after socialist Eugene Victor Debs. The couple also had a daughter, who became a clinical psychologist.
Early career
After earning his doctorate in 1958 at age 24, Flynn taught at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky, where he chaired the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights organisation in the US South. He was reprimanded by the mayor of Richmond and the university for his anti-segregation activism, and removed as the university's track coach. In 1961, he left Kentucky to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, followed by Lake Forest College in Chicago, from which he was fired for giving a lecture on social medicine, working as a peace activist, and being a member of the Socialist Party.
By Flynn's own account, in early 1960s America he was consistently fired for his social democratic politics. Accordingly, in 1963, aged 29, he emigrated with his family to New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and remained active (from afar) in the American civil rights movement. In New Zealand Flynn continued to campaign for left-wing causes, and advised Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk on foreign policy. He was a member of the anti-war Committee on Vietnam and gave lectures against nuclear proliferation. In 1967, he joined the University of Otago in Dunedin as Foundation Professor of Political Studies and head of the university's politics department. In 1973, Flynn published Humanism and Ideology: An Aristotelian View.
IQ research and the Flynn effect
In 1978, while working on a refutation of classical racism for an upcoming book about "humane ideals", Flynn read University of California, Berkeley educational psychologist Arthur Jensen's 1969 article, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?", which argued that black people scored lower than white people on IQ tests because of genetic differences between the races.
Flynn initially planned to spend only a few pages on his book refuting Jensen's work. After studying historical IQ tests, Flynn noticed that although the IQ tests were always calibrated so that a score of "100" was average, the actual raw scores showed that people's performance on the IQ tests improved over time. Flynn calculated that the average American in the year 1900 would have scored a 67 on the version of IQ tests administered in the year 2000, a score that suggested mental impairment. Because such an increase in IQ scores over only a few generations could not have been caused by genetic evolution, Flynn concluded that the increases must have been caused by changes in environmental factors, meaning that IQ is influenced more by environment than by genetics.
In 1980, Flynn published his research critiquing Jensen's work in his seminal book, Race, IQ and Jensen, which argued that increases in IQ scores over time, and differences in scores between groups of people such as black people and white people, are caused by environmental rather than genetic factors.
In 1984, he published an article, "The Mean IQ of Americans: Massive Gains 1932 to 1978", examining Stanford-Binet and Wechsler IQ test results, and reported that Americans' average scores increased by 13.8 IQ points in 46 years, almost an entire standard deviation.
In response to critics suggesting that the IQ increase could be attributed in increases in education (as opposed to innate intelligence), Flynn examined the results of Raven's Progressive Matrices IQ tests, which use visual patterns rather than words to estimate fluid intelligence or "on-the-spot problem solving", irrespective of educational or cultural differences among test-takers. Such non-verbal tests can be used to compare diverse populations such as San people and Inuktun. In 1987, Flynn published "Massive IQ Gains in 14 Nations: What IQ Tests Really Measure", which found that IQ points in 14 countries, as measured by Raven tests, increased between five and 25 points. Test score increases have been continuous and approximately linear from the earliest years of testing to the present. For the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, subjects born over a 100-year period were compared in Des Moines, Iowa, and separately in Dumfries, Scotland. Improvements were remarkably consistent across the whole period, in both countries. This effect of an apparent increase in IQ has also been observed in various other parts of the world, though the rates of increase vary.
In 1994, Harvard University psychologist Richard Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray published the highly-controversial book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which discussed Flynn's research and dubbed the increase in IQ scores the "Flynn effect". Flynn often debated Jensen and Murray, but there was mutual admiration between them, and he defended them against accusations of racism.
Flynn believed in racial equality. He advocated open scientific debate about controversial social science claims, and was critical of the suppression of research into race and intelligence. He urged those who believe in racial equality to use solid evidence to advance those beliefs. Flynn did not believe genetic differences in intelligence between races existed; he argued that intelligence is influenced by environmental factors that correlate with socioeconomic status.
The "Flynn effect" is the substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world. When intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are initially standardised using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100 and their standard deviation is set to 15 IQ points. When IQ tests are revised they are again standardised using a new sample of test-takers, usually born more recently than the first. Again, the average result is set to 100. However, when the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100. This review of contemporary research includes chapters by Ulric Neisser, James R. Flynn, Carmi Schooler, Patricia M. Greenfield, Wendy M. Williams, Marian Sigman, Shannon E. Whaley, Reynaldo Martorell, Richard Lynn, Robert M. Hauser, David W. Grissmer, Stephanie Williamson, Sheila Nataraj Kirby, Mark Berends, Stephen J. Ceci, Tina B. Rosenblum, Matthew Kumpf, Min-Hsiung Huang, Irwin D. Waldman, Samuel H. Preston, and John C. Loehlin.
Flynn gained international recognition for the Flynn effect, which has become widely accepted by psychologists and has been documented in large portions of the developed world and several developing countries, at rates too fast and dramatic to be caused by changes in genes, and correlating with environmental changes such as modernisation and improvements in education. Although Flynn was not the first to document increases in IQ or criticise IQ tests, international discussion and acceptance of the Flynn effect sparked a significant reassessment by researchers of IQ tests and the nature of human intelligence.
There are numerous proposed explanations of the Flynn effect, as well as some scepticism about its implications. Similar improvements have been reported for other cognitions such as semantic and episodic memory. Recent research suggests that the Flynn effect may have ended in at least a few developed nations, possibly allowing national differences in IQ scores to diminish if the Flynn effect continues in nations with lower average national IQs.
Flynn himself, with co-worker William Dickens, has suggested an explanatory model which points to two-way causality between IQ and environment: a cognitively challenging environment raises an individual's IQ, while in addition, a higher individual IQ makes it more likely that an individual will self-select or be sorted into more cognitively challenging environments.Dickens, William T., and James R. Flynn. "Heritability estimates versus large environmental effects: the IQ paradox resolved." Psychological Review 108.2 (2001): 346.
Later career He was in favour of homosexual law reform in New Zealand and in 1985 listed his name openly in support.