Critical Reading - A Famous Example

A Famous Example

The psychologist Cyril Burt is known for his studies on the effect of heredity on intelligence. Shortly after he died, his studied of inheritance and intelligence came into disrepute after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data. Tucker's paper (1994) is illuminative on both how "critical reading" was performed in the discovery of the falsified data as well as in many famous psychologists "non-critical reading" of Burt's papers. Tucker shows that the recognized experts within the field of intelligence research blindly accepted Cyril Burt's research even though it was without scientific value and probably directly faked: They wanted to believe that IQ is hereditary and considered uncritically empirical claims supporting this view. This paper thus demonstrates how critical reading (and the opposite) may be related to beliefs as well as to interests and power structures.