Cyril Burt

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Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt (March 3, 1883 – October 10, 1971) was a prominent British educational psychologist. He was a member of the London School of Differential Psychology. Some of his work was controversial for its conclusions that genetics substantially influence mental and behavioral traits. After his death, he was famously accused of scientific fraud.

Burt supported eugenics and was a member of the British Eugenics Society. Since he had suggested on radio in 1946 the formation of an organization for people with high IQ scores, he was made honorary president of Mensa in 1960, in a gesture of recognition.

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Biography

Burt was born in Stratford-Upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. Early in Burt’s life he showed a precocious nature, so much so that his father, a physician, often took the young Burt with him on his medical rounds. One of the elder Burt’s more famous patients was Darwin Galton, brother of Francis Galton. The visits the Burts made to the Galton estate not only allowed the young Burt to learn about the work of Francis Galton, but also allowed Burt to meet him on multiple occasions and to be strongly drawn to his ideas&#8212 -- especially his studies in statistics and individual differences, two defining characters of the London School of Psychology whose membership includes both Galton and Burt.

At the age of 11, Burt won a scholarship to Christ's Hospital, where he first developed his appreciation of psychology. Not too long after, he won a classical scholarship to Oxford, where he specialized in philosophy and psychology, the latter under a fairly new faculty member, William McDougall. McDougall, knowing Burt’s interest in Galton’s work, suggested that he focus his senior project on psychometrics (although not then an official discipline), thus giving Burt his initial inquiry into the development and structure of mental tests—-an interest that would last the rest of his life. In 1901, McDougall was appointed the secretary of the British Association Committee that planned to carry out, at Galton’s suggestion, a nation-wide survey of physical and mental characteristics. McDougall invited Burt to help him with this project along with J. C. Flugel, William Brown, and later Charles Spearman.

In 1908, Burt took up the post of Lecturer in Psychology and Assistant Lecturer in Physiology at Liverpool University, where he was to work under famed physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington. While at this post, Burt was able to further both his knowledge of how human anatomy and physiology affect human psychology as well as his interest and research into individual differences.

In 1913, Burt took the position of a school psychologist for the London County Council (LCC), which was in charge of all the London schools. This was the first appointment of this kind in the world, or at least in the United Kingdom. Initially, Burt’s LCC appointment was only a part time position, which allowed him to use the rest of his workweek gathering and publishing data. He notably established that girls were equal to boys in general intelligence — a change from contemprorary Edwardian beliefs. During his tenure at the LCC, Burt gathered so much data that he was still publishing it long after he retired.

In 1931 he resigned his position at the LCC when he was appointed Professor and Chair of Psychology at University College, London, taking over Spearman's position, thus ending his almost 20 year career as a school psychological practitioner.

While at London, Burt had a large influence on many students, (e.g., Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck), and towards the end of his life, Arthur Jensen and Chris Brand [1].

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The Burt Affair

Over the course of his career Burt published numerous articles and books on a host of topics ranging from psychometrics to philosophy of science to parapsychology. It is his research in behavior genetics, most notably in studying the heritability of intelligence (as measured in IQ tests) using twin studies that have created the most controversy.

From the late 1970s it was generally accepted that at least a majority of this research was fraudulent, due in large part to research by Oliver Gillie (1976) and Leon Kamin (1974). The possibility of fraud was first brought to the attention of the scientific community when Kamin noticed that Burt's correlation coefficients of Monozygotic and Dizygotic twins' IQ scores were the same to three decimal places, across articles--even when new data were twice added to the sample of twins. Leslie Hearnshaw, a close friend of Burt and his official biographer, concluded after examining the criticisms that most of Burt's data from after World War II were unreliable or fraudulent.

In 1976, London's Sunday Times claimed that two of Burt's collaborators, Margaret Howard and J. Conway, were made up by Burt himself. They based this on the lack of independent articles published by them in scientific journals, and the fact that they only appeared in the historical record as reviewers of Burt's books in Journal of Statistical Psychology when the journal was redacted by Burt. Supporters claim the co-authors have since been located.[2]

Two independent authors, Ronald Fletcher (1991) and Robert Joynson (1989) published books that, while not totally exonerating Burt, criticized the methods and motives of his accusers.

Many of Burt's supporters believe the disrepancies were mostly caused by negligence rather than deliberate deception. In 1995, Cambridge University's Professor of Psychology, Nicholas Mackintosh, edited a volume published by Oxford University Press which found the case against Burt 'not proven' -- the argument was summarized in 'Nature' by Edinburgh psychologist Christopher Brand[3]. Brand especially observed that Burt could have obtained some of his data that came from an unknown source from the detailed 1962 work on monozygotic twins published by James Shields (Cambridge University Press).

IQ critic William H. Tucker concludes in a 1997 article that, "A comparison of his twin sample with that from other well documented studies, however, leaves little doubt that he committed fraud." [4] Racial psychologist J. Philippe Rushton concludes that the disparagement of Burt was conducted for ideological reasons.[5] The debate remains unsettled, but Burt's controversial twin data, such as the IQ correlation between twins, .77, is identical to modern estimates by psychologists and geneticists. For example, the American Psychological Association's 1995 task force on "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" concluded that within the White population the heritability of IQ is “around .75” (75%) (p. 85), and more recent genetics textbooks give the figure at roughly 80% (Plomin et al. 2001).

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