Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt, FBA (3 March 1883 – 10 October 1971) was an English educational psychologist and geneticist who also made contributions to statistics. He is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ.
Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance of intelligence were discredited after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data, inventing correlations in separated twins which did not exist, alongside other fabrications.
Childhood and education Burt was born on 3 March 1883, the first child of Cyril Cecil Barrow Burt (b. 1857), a medical practitioner, and his wife, Martha Decina Evans. He was born in London (some sources give his place of birth as Stratford-upon-Avon, probably because his entry in Who's Who gave his father's address as Snitterfield, Stratford; in fact the Burt family moved to Snitterfield when he was ten).Hearnshaw (1979), p. 2. .The birth of Cyril Lodowic Burt was recorded in the General Register Office (now part of the Office for National Statistics) index of births in England and Wales for the June quarter of 1883:-BURT, Cyril Lodowic St. Geo. H. Sq. 1a 486 (The Registration district was St. Georges, Hanover Square, which included parts of Westminster)
Burt's father initially kept a chemist shop to support his family while he studied medicine. On qualifying, he became the assistant house surgeon and obstetrical assistant at Westminster Hospital, London.Hearnshaw (1979), p. 2. The younger Cyril Burt's education began in London at a Board school near St James's Park.
In 1890, the family briefly moved to Jersey then to Snitterfield, Warwickshire, in 1893, where Burt's father opened a rural practice. Early in Burt's life he showed a precocious nature, so much so that his father often took the young Burt with him on his medical rounds.Hearnshaw (1979), p. 7.
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; especially his studies in statistics and individual differences, two defining characters of the London School of Psychology whose membership includes both Galton and Burt.
He attended King's (now known as Warwick) School, in the county town, from 1892 to 1895, and later won a scholarship to Christ's Hospital, then located in London, where he developed his interest in psychology.
From 1902, he attended Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied Classics and took an interest in philosophy and psychology, the latter under William McDougall. McDougall, knowing Burt's interest in Galton's work, taught him the elements of psychometrics, thus helping Burt with his first steps in the development and structure of mental tests, an interest that would last the rest of his life. Burt was one of a group of students who worked with McDougall, which included William Brown, John Flügel, and May Smith, who all went on to have distinguished careers in psychology.Hearnshaw (1979), p. 11.
Burt graduated with second-class honours in Literae Humaniores (Classics) in 1906, taking a special paper in psychology in his Final Examinations. He subsequently supplemented his BA with a teaching diploma.
In 1907, McDougall invited Burt to help with a nationwide survey of physical and mental characteristics of the British people, proposed by Francis Galton, in which he was to work on the standardization of psychological tests. This work brought Burt into contact with eugenics, Charles Spearman, and Karl Pearson.
In the summer of 1908, Burt visited the University of Würzburg, Germany, where he first met the psychologist Oswald Külpe.Hearnshaw (1979), p. 13.
Work in educational psychology
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 the famed physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington. In 1909 Burt made use of Charles Spearman's model of general intelligence to analyse his data on the performance of schoolchildren in a battery of tests. This first research project was to define Burt's life's work in quantitative intelligence testing, eugenics, and the inheritance of intelligence. One of the conclusions in his 1909 paper was that upper-class children in private preparatory schools did better in the tests than those in the ordinary elementary schools, and that the difference was innate.
In 1913, Burt took the part-time position of a school psychologist for the London County Council (LCC), with the responsibility of picking out the "feeble-minded" children, in accordance with the Mental Deficiency Act 1913. He notably established that girls were equal to boys in general intelligence. The post also allowed him to work in Spearman's laboratory, and receive research assistants from the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, including Winifred Raphael.
Burt was much involved in the initiation of child guidance in Great Britain and his 1925 publication The Young Delinquent led to opening of the London Child Guidance Clinic in Islington in 1927.Hearnshaw (1979) p. 44. In 1924 Burt was also appointed part-time professor of educational psychology at the London Day Training College (LDTC), and carried out much of his child guidance work on the premises.
Later career In 1931 Burt resigned his position at the LCC and the LDTC after he was appointed professor and Chair of Psychology at University College London, taking over the position from Charles Spearman, thus ending his almost 20-year career as a school psychological practitioner. One of his students, Reuben Conrad, recalled that he once arrived at the university with a chimpanzee that he had borrowed from London Zoo, though Conrad could not recall what point Burt was trying to make.D. Bishop, July 2016 The Psychologist Vol.29 (pp.578–579) https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-29/july/quality-and-longevity While at London, Burt influenced many students, including Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck, and toward the end of his life, Arthur Jensen and Chris Brand. Burt was a consultant with the committees that developed the 11-plus examinations. This issue, and the allegations of fraudulent scholarship against him, are discussed in various books and articles listed below, including Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed and The Mismeasure of Man.
Despite his lasting reputation as a statistical psychologist Cyril Burt was also involved in psychoanalysis. He was a member of the Tavistock Clinic Council in the early 1930sHenry Dicks, 50 years of the Tavistock Clinic. Routledge 1970, p. 47. and of the British Psychoanalytical Society.Malcolm Pines, "The Development of the Psychodynamic Movement", in: 150 Years of British Psychiatry, 1841–1991. In The Young Delinquent,C. Burt, The Young Delinquent, London: University of London Press, 1925. he expressed the view that "nearly every tragedy of crime is in its origin a drama of domestic life."Quoted by Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c. 1860 – c. 1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 99.
In 1942 Burt was elected president of the British Psychological Society. In 1946 he became the first British psychologist to be knighted for his contributions to psychological testing and for making educational opportunities more widely available, according to an account by J. Philippe Rushton. Burt was a member of the London School of Differential Psychology, and of the British Eugenics Society. Because 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. He officially joined Mensa soon thereafter.
Burt retired in 1951 at the age of 68, but continued writing articles and books. He died of cancer at age 88 in London on 10 October 1971.
Scientific misconduct Burt published numerous articles and books on a host of topics ranging from psychometrics through philosophy of science to parapsychology. It is his research in behaviour genetics, most notably in studying the heritability of intelligence (as measured in IQ tests) using twin studies, that has created the most controversy, frequently referred to as "the Burt Affair".Joynson, R. B. (1989). The Burt Affair. London: Routledge.Fletcher, Ronald (1991). Science, Ideology and the Media: The Cyril Burt Scandal. New Brunswick, US: Transaction Publishers.Mackintosh, N. J. (1995). Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed? Oxford Oxford University Press.
Shortly after Burt died it became known that all of his notes and records had been burnt, and he was accused of falsifying research data. From the late 1970s, it has been generally accepted that he "fabricated some of the data, though some of his earlier work remained unaffected by this revelation." This was due in large part to research by Oliver Gillie (1976) and Leon Kamin (1974).Kamin, L. J. (1974). The Science and Politics of IQ. Potomac, Maryland: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Gillie, O. (24 October 1976). Crucial data was faked by eminent psychologist. London: Sunday Times.
The 2007 Encyclopædia Britannica noted it is widely acknowledged that his later work was flawed and many academics agree that data were falsified, though his earlier work is generally accepted as valid."Sir Cyril Burt." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Britannica Concise Encyclopædia. 19 April 2007. "Burt, Cyril Lodowic" The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2005.
The possibility of fabrication 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.Hearnshaw, L.S. (1979). Cyril Burt: Psychologist. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. William H. Tucker argued in a 1997 article, "A comparison of his twin sample with that from other well documented studies, however, leaves little doubt that he committed fraud."
Two other psychologists, Arthur Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, themselves involved in controversy for their views on race,See, for example:
Francisco Gil-White, Resurrecting Racism, Chapter 10
Douglas Wahlsten (2001) Book Review of Race, Evolution and Behavior have claimed that the contentious correlations reported by Burt are in line with the correlations found in other twin studies.Miele, Frank (2002). Intelligence, Race, And Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen, pp. 99–103. Oxford: Westview Press;
Rushton (1997) wrote that five different studies on twins reared apart by independent researchers corroborated Cyril Burt's findings and gave almost the same heritability estimate (average estimate 0.75 vs. 0.77 by Burt). Jensen argued that "[n]o one with any statistical sophistication, and Burt had plenty, would report exactly the same correlation, 0.77, three times in succession if he were trying to fake the data." Burt's statistical sophistication was, however, called into question by his student Charlotte Banks, who in a foreword to Burt's last book, published posthumously, wrote that he combined samples gathered from schoolchildren in different earlier years in his later papers without comment. In a paper Burt published in 1943, Burt states an average IQ of 153.2 for the parents in the higher professional or administrative classes, at a time when there were no standardised IQ tests for adults in the upper ranges of IQ. In 1961, Burt revised this figure to 139.7 and, in other papers, noted that he had arrived at such figures by "assessment", or guesswork, rather than testing.