Flynn himself thinks nutrition got better but the data are not clear about that.
I doubt Flynn thinks much of the nutrition hypothesis any more; his recent paper ‘Requiem for nutrition as the cause of IQ gains’ argues against nutrition as a major cause of IQ gains in developed nations. He would likely agree with you that the kinds of social changes you’re thinking of had a big impact; I seem to remember him writing in his book from three years back that contemporary people make more of a habit of thinking about things abstractly, and learn more of the mental tools needed to do well on IQ tests.
When I did fieldwork in the late 1960s in backcountry Botswana I hit upon the idea of asking my sister (a dairy farmer) to send me a box of back issues of American cattle magazines. It was unbelievable: I could have made a fortune selling pictures from them, not to mention whole issues, to the local cattle people. At that time people carefully hoarded little scraps of paper to use writing messages.
In the late 1980s I brought some more such magazines with me, and no one was interested at all. The media storm had penetrated and everyone had school textbooks, magazines, radios, etc.
Interesting. If mass media have only started to penetrate parts of Southern Africa in the last 40 years or so, I wonder if the Flynn effect is still happening there.
Editing this comment to add—I did a quick Google scholar search and didn’t find Flynn effect studies for Southern Africa. The best I could get were papers on IQ rises in Sudan and rural Kenya.
I doubt Flynn thinks much of the nutrition hypothesis any more; his recent paper ‘Requiem for nutrition as the cause of IQ gains’ argues against nutrition as a major cause of IQ gains in developed nations. He would likely agree with you that the kinds of social changes you’re thinking of had a big impact; I seem to remember him writing in his book from three years back that contemporary people make more of a habit of thinking about things abstractly, and learn more of the mental tools needed to do well on IQ tests.
When I did fieldwork in the late 1960s in backcountry Botswana I hit upon the idea of asking my sister (a dairy farmer) to send me a box of back issues of American cattle magazines. It was unbelievable: I could have made a fortune selling pictures from them, not to mention whole issues, to the local cattle people. At that time people carefully hoarded little scraps of paper to use writing messages.
In the late 1980s I brought some more such magazines with me, and no one was interested at all. The media storm had penetrated and everyone had school textbooks, magazines, radios, etc.
My main interest is how language barriers control how information, like cattle farming best practices, bounce around.
Interesting. If mass media have only started to penetrate parts of Southern Africa in the last 40 years or so, I wonder if the Flynn effect is still happening there.
Editing this comment to add—I did a quick Google scholar search and didn’t find Flynn effect studies for Southern Africa. The best I could get were papers on IQ rises in Sudan and rural Kenya.