The relationship between nations and IQ is a controversial area of study concerning differences between nations in average intelligence test scores, their possible causes, and their correlation with measures of social well-being and economic prosperity. This debate started in the early 2000's after Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen constructed and published IQ estimates for many countries using literature reviews, student assessment studies and other methodologies. Their results and conclusions caused significant controversy, and their approach has been criticized on theoretical and methodological grounds. The European Human Behavior and Evolution Association issued a formal statement in 2020 discouraging use of Lynn's datasets and describing them as unscientific. Subsequent research by psychologists such as Earl B. Hunt, Jelte Wicherts and Heiner Rindermann has focused on identifying potential national differences in IQ, investigating possible causal factors, and determining the nature of the relationship of IQ to variables such as GDP, life expectancy, and governance. Other psychologists such as Robert J. Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko have cautioned that IQ comparisons between rich and poor nations can be "dangerously misleading" and that comparisons which extend beyond the industrialized West are essentially meaningless.
National comparisons of IQ
"Average IQ values in various European countries" The 1981 article "Average IQ values in various European countries" by Vinko Buj is the only international IQ study that over a short time period has compared IQs using the same IQ test. Rindermann (2007) states that it is of dubious quality with scant information regarding how it was done.
Lynn and Vanhanen In 2002, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen published the books IQ and the Wealth of Nations and IQ and Global Inequality, which led to further investigations by other researchers, most of them highly critical of Lynn and Vanhanen's methods and conclusions. This was followed by their 2006 book IQ and Global Inequality. In these books they created estimates of average IQs for 113 nations. They estimated IQs of 79 other nations based on neighboring nations or by other methods. They also created an estimate of "quality of human conditions" for each nation based on gross national product per capita, adult literacy rate, fraction of the population to enroll in secondary education, life expectancy, and rate of democratization. Lynn and Vanhanen found a substantial correlation between the national IQ scores they created and these various socioeconomic factors. They conclude that national IQ influences these measures of well-being, and that national differences in IQ are heavily influenced by genetics, although they also allow for some environmental contributions to it. They regard nutrition as the most important environmental factor, and education a secondary factor. Many negative reviews of these books have been published in the scholarly literature. In particular, the claim that the IQ tests employed are culturally neutral and unbiased has been criticized, as have the methods used to compile the data. Susan Barnett and Wendy Williams characterized IQ and the Wealth of Nations as "an edifice built on layer upon layer of arbitrary assumptions and selective data manipulation. The data on which the entire book is based are of questionable validity and are used in ways that cannot be justified." Rindermann wrote that Lynn and Vanhanen's mixture of many different tests and the not always clear representativeness of the samples seem to be the most serious problems. Furthermore, the measurement years vary, which is problematic because of the Flynn effect. He also argued that the method of averaging neighboring countries for an estimation for the many nations that did not have measured IQs is likely problematic because some research indicates that absence of IQ tests indicates conditions such as poverty or war that may affect IQs, and that "In addition, some errors in the data have been observed". On July 27, 2020, the European Human Behavior and Evolution Association issued a formal statement opposing the utilization of Lynn's national IQ datasets, arguing that they "fall a long way short of the expected scientific standard of rigour, in terms of both data curation and measure validity." The organization concluded, "Any conclusions drawn from analyses which use these data are therefore unsound, and no reliable evolutionary work should be using these data." Writing for Stat in 2024, seven scientists documented that despite widely-known methodological flaws and Lynn's explicitly racist agenda and history of academic malpractice, Lynn's studies of national IQ were still widely cited, with at least 70 citations in the previous five years. The group called for retractions by the journals or their publishers of all of his work on national IQ, as well as investigations of those papers which cited these studies.
Wicherts, Dolan and van der Maas' analysis In 2009 Jelte M. Wicherts, Conor V. Dolan, and Han L.J. van der Maas conducted a new analysis of IQ in sub-Saharan Africa, which was critical of many of Lynn and Vanhanen's methods. Wicherts et al. concluded that Lynn and Vanhanen had relied on unsystematic methodology by failing to publish their criteria for including or excluding studies. They found that Lynn and Vanhanen's exclusion of studies had depressed their IQ estimate for sub-Saharan Africa, and that including studies excluded in "IQ and Global Inequality" resulted in average IQ of 82 for sub-Saharan Africa, lower than the average in Western countries, but higher than Lynn and Vanhanen's estimate of 67. Wicherts et al. conclude that this difference is likely due to sub-Saharan Africa having limited access to modern advances in education, nutrition and health care.
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