TECHNOS

November 20, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 1997 Vol. 6 No. 2

Technology Changes Intelligence: Societal Implications and Soaring IQs

By Robert J. Sternberg

Technology is changing society in many ways—some quite unexpected. It’s been credited with much of the dramatic rise in IQ scores over the past 30 years. But while technology’s effects on human intelligence measurement may be positive, there are some distressing and potentially negative repercussions. Are there inevitable social tradeoffs for higher IQs?

With all the moaning and groaning we constantly hear about the way schools educate our children, we often lose sight of an important and startling fact: intelligence, as measured by so-called intelligence quotients, or IQs, has been increasing over the past 30 years, and the increases are large—about 20 points of IQ per generation for tests of fluid intelligence such as the Raven Progressive Matrices, which require flexible thinking with relatively abstract and novel kinds of problems.

This effect, first pointed out by James Flynn and sometimes called the “Flynn effect” in his honor, has been found in every country where it has been possible to compare IQs across successive generations. We know it’s there. But what’s behind it?

No one knows for sure, but I think we can make an educated guess, and a good guess is that a major factor behind the massive IQ gains is an important force that has penetrated all but the most remote regions of the globe—technology.

Technology changes society profoundly, but in ways to which we become so accustomed that we hardly notice them. First radio and now television have brought to children concepts and points of view to which they would not have been exposed at the turn of the century. These days we continue to get weak programming, but we also get more and more coverage of a kind that was not formerly available, such as all-day news channels, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel.

My goal here is to discuss the effects technology may have on human intelligence, not just with levels of intelligence but also what intelligence is. I will discuss some stunningly positive effects but some distressingly negative effects as well.

The Blessings of Technology
Let’s start with the positive effects, as illustrated by examples that highlight two of the kinds of academic skills we care most about in our kids: mathematical and writing skills.

1. Computational Devices
When I went to elementary and secondary school in the 1950s and 1960s, we did all our mathematical computations by hand, and only as high school seniors did we begin to use the now almost forgotten slide rule to help us in these computations. To succeed in mathematics a student had to be skilled in computation because no matter how strong he or she was in conceptual and problem-solving skills, a wrong computation could easily lead to wrong answers in problem solving, as on homework, a quiz, or a test.

Most schools are quite different today. My children were using calculators in elementary school; and as high school students, they regularly use powerful programmable calculators that not only compute but also plot mathematical functions. They can use these calculators for homework, for teacher-made tests, and even for high-stakes testing such as the SAT.

In several important senses, our children’s informed use of calculators has increased their intelligence. First, the calculators have removed virtually all of the computational errors they once would have been likely to have made in their work. Just in terms of the answers they can produce, therefore, what was once a common source of error has been removed. Second, the use of calculators changes the way they think about mathematics—and for the better. In the past, they would have had to devote substantial mental resources to the adequate implementation of computational formulas. Much of the time they would have spent doing mathematics would therefore have been spent in fairly mindless computations. Today those computations—done by calculator—take only a fraction of a second. The mental resources they once would have placed into computation can now be spent more productively on important mathematical operations—figuring out what the problem is, visualizing how to represent the problem, formulating a strategy for solving the problem, and programming or performing the operations that will enable the calculator to compute answers. Third, the very act of using the calculator forces them to learning programming skills, which are important for developing computer-based skills as well as for developing the kind of logical thinking one needs to succeed in disciplines including but not limited to mathematics.

The availability of calculators has also changed what intelligence is. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, intelligence has been defined in terms of individual differences that are meaningful for school performance. Indeed, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, in creating the first intelligence tests, were asked to develop an instrument that would distinguish children who were truly deficient in academic potential from children who were merely behavior problems.

To the extent that we have greatly decreased the importance of computational skills as a meaningful source of individual differences in school performance, the nature of mathematical ability for school has changed. Conceptual and problem-solving abilities, focal both to mathematics and to intelligence, have now become more important to success in school mathematics. In other words, we have made school mathematics more like real mathematics and more like the kind of activity we want students to do to develop their intellectual abilities. Moreover, as children learn to use more powerful computational devices, such as full-fledged computers, in their mathematical work, their opportunities to develop their intellectual skills will only increase.

2. Word Processing
The changes we have produced both in levels and in the nature of abilities apply not only in the mathematical domain but in other domains as well. Consider the case of word processing in the domain of writing.

Not so long ago, when someone wanted to write a poem, a short story, an essay, or whatever, the options were to use a pen or to use a pencil. Then typewriters came along, offering people the opportunity to increase greatly the efficiency with which words could be processed. When I learned touch-typing, a whole new world opened up to me. I could produce documents much more efficiently and quickly, and, perhaps even more important, I no longer needed to worry about what effect my awful penmanship would have on my teachers’ evaluations of my work. Penmanship has become a less important ability not because it is any less a source of individual differences, but because its importance to how students are evaluated in the school setting has decreased.

Typewriters were an improvement, but correcting errors with a typewriter eraser was a slow operation. Recognizing this, my ninth-grade typing teacher subtracted 10 words per minute for every error we made in our timed tests; and I made a lot of errors! Two technological developments came along—eraser paper and liquid eraser fluid—and the correcting of errors became more rapid, less painful, and less disruptive of the flow of thoughts during writing.

As typewriters improved, so did the efficacy with which students could write. Manual typewriters were gradually replaced by electric typewriters, and then electronic typewriters became available. But a much bigger shift occurred when typewriters gave way to word-processing programs on computers. Where are those Royal, Remington, and Smith-Corona typewriters today? Many of them can be found only in antique shops.

With computers, typing mistakes can be corrected with the push of a button. Whole passages can be deleted, transformed, or moved from one place in a document to another in a fraction of the time it once took. My own productivity has increased many times over as a result of my being able to use a computer-based word-processing program to do my writing, including the writing of this article.

With word processors, students and other people can devote more time to thinking about the quality of their writing and less to the low-level mechanics of getting the writing done. If they make a typing error, they can correct it in seconds, thereby holding onto their train of thought. If they decide that a sentence doesn’t work, deleting it can be done in seconds rather than in the minutes it once took to make the erasures on a document. If they wish to move one or more paragraphs to improve the flow of their writing, they can do in seconds what once might easily have taken several hours to rewrite or retype a document. Word processors enable writers to concentrate on composition, on logic, and on being creative rather than on the low-level mechanics of producing a finished-looking document.

Notice that, once again, technology has both increased the intelligence of students and transformed it. Their products are, or at least should be, better. Individual differences in analytical and creative writing skills have become more important as individual differences in penmanship, typing speed, and erasure speed have become less important to teachers’ evaluations of students’ products.

Technology can enable people better to develop their intelligence—no question about it. And the two cases I’ve given are only a small sample of those that might be mentioned. Computer games can help develop children’s rapid thinking as well as spatial and perceptual-motor skills. New software also enables students to learn about science and scientific research in ways that were never possible before. What a blessing!

The Challenges of Technology
But technology can also be a curse. Almost anything that can be used to good purposes can be twisted to bad ones, and technology is no exception. Two more cases illustrate the challenges we face in implementing the technology we have available.

3. Television
Children, not to mention adults, spend enormous—some would say monstrous—amounts of time watching television. What return are they getting for the time they are spending?

Along with a fair amount of good television, there is a much larger amount of trash. It’s easy to blame the networks, but we need to remember that they produce programming in response to what their surveys show people watch. People say they want one thing but often respond to another, as many chain restaurants found when they introduced healthful, low-fat food, only to find that the demand to have such products available was in no way matched by the demand to consume them.

Typical noneducational television can help children acquire some concepts and some vocabulary, but only to the relatively low level allowed on most shows. Not only are many shows relatively mindless, but so is the kind of information processing required to understand them. Anyone who has ever appeared on shows quickly learns that even responses to interviews on supposedly educational programs need to be kept short, simple, and direct. Banal questions encourage banal answers. For the most part, television does not encourage the development of active, mindful, and critical thinking.

The problem is not inherent in the medium, as anyone who has watched educational shows can confirm. It is in the use of the medium. This use is dictated, in turn, by demand, which determines the dollars sponsors are willing to pay to advertise their products on the shows. If we want change, we need to be willing to pay for it, which means financial support for educational programming. But it also requires parents who insist that if their children are going to watch television, at least a fair share of it needs to be educational programming.

4. Weapons
We do not often associate weapons with education, but in the final days of the twentieth century we have little choice. Every year seems to bring both greater technological sophistication and, unfortunately, easier availability of weapons to schoolchildren. The problem is one we cannot afford to duck, because it has many effects on children’s thinking and lives, some of them not so easily observable to middle-class adults.

First, children who are spending their time worrying about violence in school and on the way to school are not thinking about lessons. The psychologist Abraham Maslow was among the first to point out that human motivation tends to be hierarchically structured, so that we need to worry about safety and survival needs before we can worry about needs for cognitive growth. Children worried about self-protection cannot be expected to engage fully in the educational program of the school.

Second, research shows that children who watch aggressive and violent models end up behaving in kind. The models we provide on TV shows do not speak well for the values we wish to foster in our children.

Third, kids are killing kids with weapons. More and more children are dying at each others’ hands. The waste to our pool of human resources is enormous, both in terms of the children who die and in terms of the children who, having killed, inevitably find their lives permanently altered for the worse. Is this what we want for our children?

Fourth, in many nations of the world, sophisticated but cheap weapons like land mines are leaving a generation of permanently maimed children who are and will be severely challenged in their ability to adapt to the world in which they must live. The time other children are able to spend learning school subjects is time these children have to spend, day after day, week after week, and year after year, learning to cope with their injuries.

Summing Up
Technology can be and, from all the evidence available, has been a highly constructive force in the development of intelligence in our children. It has made it possible for them to experience events and even virtual worlds that were never available to their parents when they were children. Technology is helping to raise levels of intelligence and even reshaping what intelligence is. Increasingly, the intelligence one needs for coping with the environment will involve complex, higher-order thinking skills rather than routine, lower-order skills. At the same time, technology is creating challenges that we have been much less than effective in solving, challenges such as those challenges posed by television and weapons in the school environment.

As technology increases the importance of higher-order thinking skills and decreases the importance of lower-order and more routinized ones, there is a risk of greater and greater socioeconomic polarization of our society. Those with good conceptual and technological skills will increasingly be able to advance to more meaningful and higher-paying jobs, whereas those without these skills will increasingly be relegated to lower-level jobs. Jobs that once were in the middle will start to creep upward or downward, or even disappear.

An effective secretary today, for example, must have the conceptual and technological skills to use sophisticated word-processing machinery effectively; the job has gone up scale. But to operate most cash registers, one needs only to be able to scan a bar code—no longer does one need to add, subtract, multiply, and divide; the job has gone downscale. And more and more middle-level jobs, such as those of telephone operator and bank teller, are dying out as technology does what was formerly done by humans. The middle is disappearing in the job market and in our socioeconomic stratification as well.

Sociologists speak of “Matthew effects,” an expression coined by sociologist Robert Merton from the Biblical Book of Matthew based on the notion that to those who have much, more will come, and to those who have little, even less will come. Technology can create Matthew effects as it increasingly separates the skilled from the unskilled among both students and workers.

As a society, we need to be prepared for the changes to come. Most important, we need to educate all our students so that they do not get left out in the technological cold. We need to develop not only their technological skills but their conceptual ones as well. Those who have doubts only have to go through supermarket checkout lines, and watch the look of utter puzzlement that crosses the faces of some checkers when a product lacks the proper bar code.

Technology can bring a wonderful future to our children. But we have to shape it and teach children how to use it effectively and constructively. We need to remember that technology will not be a substitute for intelligence. It will change levels of intelligence and even what intelligence is. As educators, we need to ensure that the changes are for the better and not for the worse.

Robert Sternberg, IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University, is the author of several books, including the new Successful Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determines Success in Life. He can be reached at <sterobj@yalevm.cis.yale.edu>.

Photo courtesy of Michael Marsland, Yale University Office of Public Affairs.