Burt, Cyril

Oxford-educated Cyril Burt (1883–1971), president of the British Psychological Society, editor of the British Journal of Statistical Psychology, the first psychologist to be knighted by British royalty, and first British subject to win the Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association, was also one of the most controversial psychological theorists of the past century. In fact, recent evidence suggests that he invented the data that supported his theories of the relationship between intelligence and class. In 2004, Horace Judson scored Burt's work by remarking that it supported racist and elitist arguments for his premises regarding the heritability of intelligence.

Born to a middle-class family, Burt received a teacher's diploma from Jesus College at Oxford. He spent the subsequent summer studying psychology under Oswald Külpe at the University of Würzburg in Germany and lectured in experimental psychology at the University of Liverpool from 1908 to 1913. During that time, he conducted his first controversial study, which compared the intelligence of boys enrolled in an elite preparatory school with that of boys attending a regular school. Boys did mirror drawings, designed to control for environmental influences. He concluded that the preparatory schoolboys benefited from superior genetic inheritance because their drawings scored higher than the others.

He held prestigious positions and authored numerous publications, including 9 books and more than 300 articles, lectures, and book chapters. Publication venues included The British Journal of Psychology, Journal of Experimental Pedagogy, British Journal of Educational Psychology, British Journal of Statistical Psychology, British Journal of Mathematical and Statistical Psychology, and The American Psychologist.

From 1913 to 1932, the London County Council School System employed him as chief psychologist. During that tenure, he adapted French and American intelligence tests for English use and developed tests of educational achievement. He was professor of educational psychology at London Day Training Centre from 1924 to 1932, and until 1950 was Charles Spearman Chair of Psychology at University College, London. Some consider him the founder of the field of educational psychology in Great Britain, most notably by creating and implementing a system for identifying mentally retarded students.

The greatest controversy surrounding Burt regards his advocacy for intelligence based on heredity. He advocated for a national testing program in Great Britain, the “Eleven-Plus” exam, that could identify bright children from all socioeconomic levels. He argued his theory through a series of articles on the intelligence of identical twins raised in different homes. He claimed that the intelligence scores of every set of twins were similar.

After Burt's death, however, Leon Kamin, among others, criticized his work. Kamin doubted the consistency of Burt's correlation coefficients. Other criticisms questioned raw data from Burt's studies that either disappeared or never existed, the authenticity of cited research assistants, inconsistencies in the number of subjects reported, and the implausibility of finding 53 sets of identical twins who had been reared apart. So despite the fact that some credit Burt with expanding the statistical technique of factor analysis, his major studies and findings remain questionable.

Burt's work and the controversy surrounding it foreshadowed two major issues that engage contemporary educational leadership. The first is “nature versus nurture.” How can the educational system influence factors that children bring to the school door? Second, questions about Burt's methods unlocked the Pandora's box of accountability issues that now intensely surround all of us.

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