Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

PRETEND INTELLIGENCE 103

Th ey found a substantial dose- dependent transfer to per for mance on a
matrices test like the Raven.
In a 2011 paper in the journal Developmental Science, Allyson Mackey
and colleagues showed average improvements of 10 points from training
seven to nine year olds. Timothy Salt house showed that cognitive test
experience at any age improves per for mance at a later age, irrespective of
age of participants (from eigh teen to eighty years). Sylvain Moreno and
colleagues showed that even computerized training in music for pre-
school children boosted IQ test per for mance. Others have shown how
factors like physical exercise that improve sense of well- being also improve
memory and cognitive test scores. All these results suggest that experi-
ence with an appropriate cultural tool and/or a boost to self- confi dence
or other mea sure of well- being enhances test- taking ability.^38
Such results also suggest that we have no right to pin such individual
diff erences on biology without the obvious, but impossible, experiment.
Th at would entail swapping the circumstances of upper- and lower- class
newborns— parents’ inherited wealth, personalities, stresses of poverty,
social self- perceptions, and so on— and following them up, not just over
years or de cades but also over generations (remembering the eff ects of
maternal stress on children, mentioned above). And it would require
unrigged tests based on proper cognitive theory.

EXPLAINING THE FLYNN EFFECT

As mentioned above, the phenomenon of ever- rising average test scores
remains puzzling to g theorists. Tortuous webs of explanation have been
spun in the lit er a ture in recent years, but with little agreement.
However, the Flynn eff ect is readily explained once we accept that IQ
tests are mea sures of social class and cultural affi liation rather than tests
of innate ability. Th ese leaps in scores correspond to the demographic
swelling of the middle classes over the period in question: the movement
of individuals to new levels in the social power structure. On one hand,
the increasing class elevation means greater use in families of test- relevant
cultural learning, such as conceptual categories and text and number
literacy. On the other hand, it means improved sense of place in the power

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