KAMIN, Leon

British psychologist and researcher at University College London who falsely claimed to have discovered separated identical twins for his studies on intelligence and personality, later exposed as one of the most significant cases of scientific fraud in psychology. Kamin’s investigations in the 1970s revealed that Cyril Burt had fabricated data on twin studies that were used to support hereditarian claims about intelligence and educational policy in Britain.

Kamin, a Princeton University psychology professor, became suspicious of Burt’s twin studies while examining the literature on intelligence heritability for his 1974 book “The Science and Politics of IQ.” He noticed that Burt’s correlation coefficients for separated twins remained identical to three decimal places across different sample sizes and publications, a statistical impossibility that suggested data fabrication rather than genuine research results.

Further investigation revealed that Burt’s alleged research assistants, Margaret Howard and J. Conway, likely never existed, and that many of the separated twins described in his studies could not be independently verified. Burt’s fabricated research had been influential in supporting arguments for genetic determinism in education and had been used to justify selective schooling systems in Britain based on supposedly inherited differences in intelligence.

Kamin’s exposure of Burt’s fraud had significant implications for both psychology and educational policy, demonstrating how fabricated research could influence social policy for decades before being detected. The case highlighted the importance of peer review, replication, and independent verification in scientific research, while also illustrating how ideological commitments could motivate researchers to fabricate data supporting their preferred political conclusions about human nature and social organization.