The Flynn Effect

James Flynn – Emeritus Professor of Political Studies at Otago University, intelligence researcher and “unassuming moral philosopher” – is profiled in the Guardian. Born in Washington DC, Flynn has lived and worked in NZ since 1963. After spending most of his career studying free will and determinism in terms of political and moral philosophy, Flynn “gate-crashed” the IQ test debate in the 1980s and has emerged as one of the world’s leading psychology theorists as a result. He is best known for his discovery of the Flynn effect: the continued year-by-year rise of IQ scores in the developed world. “There had been several studies showing that IQ levels were rising, but on each occasion the researchers wrote off their findings as anomalous one-offs,” says Flynn. “All I really did was to piece together the existing studies and read through the IQ publishers’ manuals to detect the underlying patterns.”