The Undying Quest for Intelligence

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of Flynn Effect and its possible explanations in today's world. An underlying quest among all of us keeps emerging that are we really more smarter than our parents and grandparents. Flynn Effect proposes that people today are getting smarter at skills that are more important in our society today, particularly abstract thinking. In the past century, our society has progressed from being agricultural to being industrial and is now information-based. As our society has progressed, people have become better at thinking in abstract, scientific terms. However, environmental changes resulting from modernization such as more intellectually demanding work, greater use of technology and smaller families have meant that a much larger proportion of people are more accustomed to manipulating abstract concepts such as hypotheses and categories than a century ago.