PII: S0160-2896(02)00094-6
New evidence on Sir Cyril Burt: His 1964 Speech to the Association of Educational Psychologists John Philippe Rushton* Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5C2 Received 24 February 2001; received in revised form 2 October 2001; accepted 22 January 2002 Abstract After reviewing the debate that raged over Cyril Burt’s [Br. J. Psychol. 57 (1966) 137] finding of a correlation of .771 for IQ scores in 53 pairs of monozygotic twins raised apart, this paper provides the transcript of a previously unpublished speech by Burt given on May 2, 1964, at the age of 81, on the occasion of his appointment as Patron to the Association of Educational Psychologists (AEP). Burt’s speech is of special interest because it occurred just prior to the publication of a paper later alleged to be built on fraudulent data. Kamin [The Science and Politics of IQ (1974). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum] declared Burt’s correlation of .771 to be implausibly high and implausibly invariant from that reported in his 1943 work. Hearnshaw [Cyril Burt: Psychologist (1979). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press] concluded that Burt had made up his data, and the Sunday Times (1976) even alleged that Burt had conjured his research assistants up out of thin air. Then, independent books by Joynson [The Burt Affair (1989). London: Routledge] and by Fletcher [Science, Ideology and The Media: The Cyril Burt Scandal (1991). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction] vindicated Burt (the ‘‘missing’’ research assistants were found and the twin data had not been ‘‘cooked’’). More recently, Mackintosh [Cyril Burt: Fraud or Framed? (1995). Oxford: Oxford University Press] reiterated Hearnshaw’s allegations of fraud, including the claim that Burt did not have access to new data after his retirement in 1950. However, as Fletcher pointed out, Burt was openly requesting educational psychologists to help him locate additional pairs of twins raised apart. Moreover, in the 1964 talk presented here,…