The Coining of the Flynn Effect

Written by Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein and published in 1994, The Bell Curve sold 1.3 million copies and became one of the best-selling and most controversial books in the history of psychology.

The overall argument of The Bell Curve is that if you increase the average intelligence of people, then you subsequently increase their chances of climbing the social ladder. But how is it possible to increase the IQ of a population? Can you manipulate people’s IQ? One of the only examples of tangible IQ gains is the dramatic increase of IQ scores from the early 20th century to the present day. The Bell Curve refers a lot to this phenomenon, and to the person who has studied it and brought attention to its implications. The Phenomenon is known as “The Flynn Effect”. This term was first coined in The Bell Curve and named after the pioneering research of James Flynn.