IQ scores reverse as social media creates ‘crowdsourced lobotomy’

CITYWIDE — IN A NEW cover story titled “A Theory of Dumb,” New York Magazine investigates why the 20th-century trend of rising IQ scores, known as the “Flynn effect,” appears to be reversing. The piece highlights research by Elizabeth Dworak of Northwestern University, who found declines in fluid intelligence — logic and problem-solving — across 394,378 tests taken between 2006 and 2018, with the steepest drops among 18 to 22 year-olds.

The decline is driven by “unfettered access to each other,” where social media compresses complex information into memes and nonsense, creating a “crowdsourced lobotomy.”

The article draws parallels to AI “model collapse,” suggesting that just as AI degrades when fed its own output, human cognition is suffering from a feedback loop of low-quality