Barbara Stoddard Burks (December 22, 1902—May 25, 1943) was an American psychologist known for her research on the nature-nurture debate as it pertained to intelligence and other human traits.
[1] She has been credited with "...pioneer[ing] the statistical techniques which continue to ground the trenchant nature/nurture debates about intelligence in American psychology.
Also in 1935, she was given a fellowship by the General Education Board to study psychology in Europe,[4] where she collaborated with Jean Piaget, Carl Jung, and Charlotte Buhler.
[3] In 1936, she returned to the United States, where she was named a research associate at the Carnegie Institute of Washington at Cold Spring Harbor.
[8] The study was cited favorably by Arthur Jensen in support of his hereditarian views, but it has been criticized for having a biased sample and for its limited measurements of environmental factors.
[12] King et al. (1996) cite letters in the Terman archive to the effect that "She had also become engaged to marry Robert Cook but, according to her mother, had continually struggled with depression following a "severe nervous breakdown" in 1942 (Burks, F. W., 1943).
"[13] (Paul J. Nahin has suggested that Vannevar Bush's decision to close the eugenics program at Cold Spring Harbor in 1940, may have caused depression, which then led to suicide.