The Burt Affair: 40 years on

Abstract

The ‘Burt Affair’ has gone through several phases: an initial onslaught on his reputation, well publicised by Gillie in 1976; a more measured confirmation of some of the charges of fraud in Hearnshaw’s official biography in 1979; a vigorous rebuttal of essentially all the charges in two books, by Joynson in 1989 and Fletcher in 1991; a more hesitant confirmation of a least some of the charges in a book edited by Mackintosh in 1995. Where are we now? Some new analyses, by Burbridge and Tucker, of the most notorious case, that of the separated identical twins, has suggested that it really is rather unlikely that Burt could have gathered data on 53 pairs of such twins, all separated before the age of six months, and many brought up in families of such different social classes. There remain serious, and unanswered, questions about his paper on educational standards. An analysis of the correspondence between Burt and Spearman by Lovie and Lovie makes it quite clear that Burt later seriously misrepresented the relative importance of his own and Spearman’s contributions to early work on factor analysis. But an equally strong reason for accepting at least some of the case for the prosecution is that so many of the arguments advanced by the defence have been (and still are) so very weak. Much the same could be equally said of some of the wilder accusations made by the prosecution (but not of the important, central charges). Indeed, in so far as the Burt Affair still merits our attention today, it is perhaps because the way it has all too often been discussed reflects so poorly on so many of the participants.