Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
huffingtonpost.com
Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
1–10 of 11 posts
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#2> Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.
I reject this premise.
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#3punchline of what they actually studied: "As for Dr. te Nijenhuis and colleagues, they analyzed the results of 14 intelligence studies conducted between 1884 to 2004, including one by Sir Francis Galton, an English anthropologist and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Each study gauged participants' so-called visual reaction times -- how long it took them to press a button in response to seeing a stimulus. Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence."
it seems like a big jump from reaction time to intelligence in any more general sense.
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#4> Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence. I reject this premise.
>> Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence.
This is so fallacious it hurts. I guess people who play CoD, StarCraft and other reaction-intensive games are the smartest people on the planet.
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#5I call bull$5*7 on this article.
Explanation: they measured visual response speed and only briefly mentioned the Flynn effect with a "maybe" explanation? Not scientific.
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#6> Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence. I reject this premise.
The premise you (rightly) reject is misreported -- the actual reason reaction time is being used as a proxy for IQ is that it has been established to have a correlation with IQ, not for the stupid reason reported in the HuffPo article. (Its like whoever wrote that article didn't even read the abstract of the paper its about.)
OTOH, I'm not convinced there is enough of an understanding of that correlation (particularly an understanding of what other factors contribute to reaction time variations and how they have varied over the time in question) to simply assume that it can be treated as invariant in conditions other than those in which the correlation has been studied.
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#7> Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence. I reject this premise.
[deleted]
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#8Idiocracy was still a bad movie.
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#9This isn't science, it's sociology and psychology in equal measure. Reaction time is an innately crude measure, and extrapolating from reaction time to intelligence is dubious at best. To see my point, imagine using it to measure Stephen Hawking's intelligence.
I'm a pretty bright person, but I'm almost 70 years old and I just don't have the reaction times of a young person -- or that I did when I was younger and a great deal dumber :).
If readers watched me typing at my keyboard, some would likely find it frustrating and might wonder how anything useful could possibly issue from all that slow pecking. But the end result is a crude approximation of intelligence -- created slowly, and in a way that would flunk the kind of examination on which the linked study relies.
At the very least, the study relies on a superficial correlation between reaction time and intelligence in young people, while ignoring the fact that as the years pass one's intelligence might increase, while one's reaction times decrease.
When I was about 20 I took an IQ test at NYU, one that relied more than anything else on speed of response. The outcome was that I got the "very superior" designation I expected and was accustomed to in those days. But on reflection I realized I had taken so many of those kinds of tests that I was simply nailing the test, not the property it was meant to measure. If I took the same test today I would probably not do very well, but I'm certainly functioning at a higher level than I did then.
Closing remark. When Alfred Binet was asked what IQ was, he replied, "It's what my test measures."
Re: Human Intelligence Has Declined Since Victorian Era, Research Suggests
#10About 10 years ago I was diagnosed with ADHD, and as part of the testing I was given an IQ test. I don't recall now which test it was, but the scores were given in four categories, and while in three of the categories my scores were very closely comparable with each other, the "visual intelligence" score--which included a computerized reaction time test--was significantly lower.
As I understood their explanation at the time, this sort of discrepancy between category scores was common among ADHD sufferers, though they could only speculate as to why.
(My own explanation of this that feels right for me based on my own experience with ADHD is that some parts of my brain are operating at different speeds than others, but total appropriate coordination of action requires all the elements to be in sync. And when these elements are out of sync, they result in the symptoms that together are recognized as ADHD.)
Point being that I'd be curious to see if the drop-off in reaction times correlates in any useful way to the rise in ADHD. Perhaps there's a connection there (even if the reaction time test is pointless and ADHD is just a mass-delusional means to excuse epidemic amphetamine abuse).