33 Facts About Cyril Burt

Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt, FBA was an English educational psychologist and geneticist who made contributions to statistics.

Cyril Burt is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ.

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 Cyril Burt's father opened a rural practice.

Cyril Burt attended King's 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.

Cyril Burt graduated with second-class honours in Literae Humaniores in 1906, taking a special paper in psychology in his Final Examinations.

Cyril Burt subsequently supplemented his BA with a teaching diploma.

In 1907, McDougall invited Cyril 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.

In 1908, Cyril 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 Cyril 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.

In 1913, Cyril Burt took the part-time position of a school psychologist for the London County Council, with the responsibility of picking out the "feeble-minded" children, in accordance with the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.

Cyril Burt notably established that girls were equal to boys in general intelligence.

Cyril 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.

In 1924 Cyril Burt was appointed part-time professor of educational psychology at the London Day Training College, and carried out much of his child guidance work on the premises.

In 1931 Cyril 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 Cyril Burt was trying to make.

Cyril Burt was a consultant with the committees that developed the 11-plus examinations.

Cyril Burt was a member of the Tavistock Clinic Council in the early 1930s and of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

In 1942 Cyril Burt was elected president of the British Psychological Society.

Cyril Burt was a member of the London School of Differential Psychology, and of the British Eugenics Society.

Cyril Burt retired in 1951 at the age of 68, but continued writing articles and books.

Cyril Burt died of cancer at age 88 in London on 10 October 1971.

Cyril Burt published numerous articles and books on a host of topics ranging from psychometrics through philosophy of science to parapsychology.

Shortly after Cyril Burt died it became known that all of his notes and records had been burnt, and he was accused of falsifying research data.

Two other psychologists Arthur Jensen and J Philippe Rushton, themselves involved in controversy for their views on race, have claimed that the contentious correlations reported by Burt are in line with the correlations found in other twin studies.

In 1961, Cyril 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.

Between 1952 and 1959, Cyril Burt lived in London and had two associates, Charlotte Banks and Gertrude Keir, neither of who ever met Howard or Conway.

Cyril Burt explained their absence and lack of contact by adding that both had emigrated and he had lost their addresses.

However, he does not address the central issue, that Cyril Burt wrote scientific papers and published them as editor of a journal under false names and without the consent of the supposed authors.

Cyril Burt added that testing separated twins was expensive: Burt had no research funds to pay research workers and his own finances were too stretched to pay for it himself.

Further, he instanced two other example of what he terms Cyril Burt's deviousness ignored by Fletcher.

However Joynson accepted that Cyril Burt frequently used assumed names to publish papers that Cyril Burt had written himself: the names he used included those of Howard and Conway.

Cyril Burt's defenders have claimed that everyone knew that, after his retirement, Cyril Burt's data was flawed and that he published articles under pseudonyms, adding that the British Psychological Society could have stopped this if it had violated accepted ethical norms of the time.