Does Watching TV REALLY Make You Smarter?
Steven Johnson argues that “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” in his aptly named New York Times Magazine piece. He uses the evolution of television shows from “Hill Street Blues” to “West Wing” and the increasingly complicated plots as evidence of this evolution. However, I believe his argument runs into a “chicken and egg” problem and confuses correlation with causation.
First, Johnson relies upon the changes in plot and narrative structure from 1970’s television to today to show that consumers desire more cognitively demanding programming and also have the ability to process it. Implicit in this analysis is the idea that tv programming represents the maximum complexity viewers are capable of understanding at a given point in time. Otherwise his analysis would be nonsensical, if for example, 1970’s television required viewers to use 80% of their reasoning capacity, and modern tv required 100%--obviously then, you would expect the plots to get more complicated. Of course, Johnson doesn’t actually show that he is comparing similar perceived levels of complexity. Instead, he only shows that preferences for complexity have changed, when he points out that an early pilot of “Hill Street” got complaints that it was too complicated. This example does not show that viewers were incapable of understanding “Hill Street” (indeed if they were the show would not have performed as well as it did) but instead shows that viewers at that time did not want a show that was so complicated.
Even if you believe that Americans have gotten smarter in the past forty years, Johnson never shows that that growing intelligence is a direct result of growing television complexity. It is entirely possible, and perhaps more plausible, that Americans have simply grown more used to complexity and thus tv shows evolved to suit changing preferences. In this sense, he is unable to prove which came first—increased intelligence or more complex tv shows. Indeed, studies have documented that by modern standards, Americans have had a growing average IQ with each generation. Add to that the fact that the rate of education in the U.S. is markedly different today from the 1970’s (even though the our ailing education system performs poorly by international standards), it seems more believable that Americans have simply become better equipped to process complicated stories, and t.v. has reacted to that.
