Flynn Blair

The history of intelligenceNew spectacles for developmental psychology

James R. Flynn

Clancy Blair

The best-known developmentally based theory of intelligence is that of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. He had little interest in individual differences. He illuminatedhow intelligence developed, in all children, from initial cognitive structures to later ones.These structures assimilated information and evolved to accommodate new information.Piaget’s tests were designed to record the development of intelligence. For example, toassess whether a child understood that the quantity of something was not altered bychange of shape, water was poured from a shallow beaker to a tall one and the childasked whether there was more water than before.The psychometric approach to the study of intelligence did not arise out of developmental concerns but rather, focused on measuring intelligence differences between individuals. Charles Spearman was the first to give it a theoretical foundation.He identified the general factor of intelligence or

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. Its justification was empirical.Individual performance across a wide range of cognitive tasks tends to be positivelycorrelated. Someone superior to the average person in classifying objects will tend to besuperior in identifying the missing piece of a matrix and so forth.

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However, right from the start, the psychometric tradition recognized that thedevelopment of intelligence had a sociological dimension. Every individual is a member of a group. For example, even within one nation, the social context in which a black child develops may differ profoundly from that of a white child. It was inevitable thatscholars like Arthur Jensen would study group differences. The group differences of greatest interest were the general skills to which the label intelligence is usually appliedand the two most important academic skills, namely, reading and mathematics.We will try to show that writing cognitive history integrates the developmentaland psychometric approaches and therefore, sheds new light on cognitive abilities andtheir development. To make our case, we will do seven things: discuss the psychometricand developmental traditions; summarize the cognitive history of the 20th century inAmerica; distinguish cognitive history from the science of measuring intelligence;illustrate how cognitive history can correct mistakes in applied psychology that aredifficult to self-correct; use it to clarify the roles of genes and environment; use it to showthat enhancing intelligence is a life time quest; show how it revolutionizes the task of accounting for group differences.

The psychometric and developmental traditions

In combination, the psychometric (or differential) and developmental traditions cross-fertilize and provide valuable information about intelligence. But they begin from verydifferent starting points and with different sets of assumptions. This is seen most clearlyin the idea that intelligence within the psychometric tradition does not really develop per se. The emphasis is on the measurement of an underlying individual difference

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characteristic, one that is manifest in a variety of ways at different ages but is for the most part stable from very early until very late in the lifespan (Deary, 2000).The psychometric tradition recognizes that performance on the indicators used toassess intelligence improves from childhood to adulthood, for example, the size andextent of vocabulary knowledge, an indicator of what is referred to as crystallizedintelligence, and the ability to complete increasingly complex puzzles or patterns, anindicator of what is referred to as fluid intelligence. But it does not treat thisdevelopment as equivalent to enhanced intelligence. Rather it posits a stable underlyingindividual difference characteristic (IQ) and therefore, ranks the individual’s scores ontests like vocabulary and analyzing patterns by comparing them to the scores of the sameage individuals in the population from which that individual was drawn. These rankings(deviation IQ scores) tend to have excellent psychometric properties. They are internallyvery coherent, are remarkably similar from one time point to the next, and do about asgood a job as any other available measure in providing information about an individual'slevel of competence relative to others, making them highly useful although rarifiedindicators of psychological functioning.This emphasis on stability over time and between-person (inter-individual)variability in the measurement of intelligence in the psychometric tradition stands insharp contrast to an emphasis on change and within-person (intra-individual) variabilityin the developmental tradition. In the developmental tradition, the emphasis is on the rateand extent of change in the various indicators of intelligence, such as vocabulary or pattern completion, and most importantly on the determinants of change (Ferrer &

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