Do you think you're smarter than your parents and grandparents? According to James Flynn, a professor at New Zealand university, you are! over the course of the last century people who have taken l tests have gotten increasingly better scores on average, three points better for every decade that has passed. This improvement is known as "the Flynn effect," and scientists want to know what is behind it
iq tests and other similar tests are designed to measure general intelligence rather than knowledge. Flynn knew that intelligence is partly inherited from our parents and partly the result of our environment and experiences, but the improvement in test scores was happening too quickly to be explained by heredity. So what was happening in the 20th century that was helping people achieve higher scores on intelligence tests?