Hans Jürgen Eysenck ( ; 4 March 1916 – 4 September 1997) was a German-born British psychologist. He is best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, although he worked on other issues in psychology.Boyle, G.J., & Ortet, G. (1997). Hans Jürgen Eysenck: Obituario. Ansiedad y Estrés (Anxiety and Stress), 3, i–ii.Boyle, G.J. (2000). Obituaries: Raymond B. Cattell and Hans J. Eysenck. Multivariate Experimental Clinical Research, 12, i–vi. At the time of his death, Eysenck was the most frequently cited living psychologist in peer-reviewed scientific journal literature.
Eysenck's research included claims that certain personality types had an elevated risk of cancer and heart disease and research on IQ scores and race (first published in 1971), which were a significant source of controversy. Scholars have identified errors and suspected data manipulation in Eysenck's work, and large replications have failed to confirm the relationships that he purported to find.
An enquiry on behalf of King's College London found the papers by Eysenck coauthored with Ronald Grossarth-Maticek to be "incompatible with modern clinical science", with 26 of the joint papers considered suspect. Fourteen papers were retracted in 2020, and over 60 statements of concern were issued by scientific journals in 2020 about publications by Eysenck. David Marks and Rod Buchanan, a biographer of Eysenck, have argued that 87 publications by Eysenck should be retracted.
Life
Eysenck was born in Berlin, Germany. His mother was Silesian-born film star Helga Molander, and his father, Eduard Anton Eysenck, was an actor and nightclub entertainer who was once voted the "handsomest man on the Baltic coast". His mother was Lutheran and his father was Catholic. Eysenck was brought up by his maternal grandmother who was a Jewish convert to Catholicism. Subjected to the Nuremberg laws, she was deported and died in a concentration camp.Eysenck, H. J., Rebel with a Cause (an Autobiography), London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1990 An initial move to England in the 1930s became permanent because of his opposition to the Nazi party and its persecutions. "My hatred of Hitler and the Nazis, and all they stood for, was so overwhelming that no argument could counter it." Because of his German citizenship, he was initially unable to gain employment, and he came close to being interned during the war. He received his PhD in 1940 from University College London (UCL) working in the Department of Psychology under the supervision of Professor Sir Cyril Burt, with whom he had a tumultuous professional relationship throughout his working life.
Eysenck was Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, from 1955 to 1983. He was a major contributor to the modern scientific theory of personality and helped find treatment for mental illnesses.Behaviour Therapy and the Neurosis, edited by Hans Eysenck, London: Pergamon Press, 1960.Eysenck, Hans J., Experiments in Behaviour Therapy, London: Pergamon Press, 1964. Eysenck also created and developed a distinctive dimensional model of personality structure based on empirical factor-analytic research, attempting to anchor these factors in biogenetic variation. In 1981, Eysenck became a founding member of the World Cultural Council. He was the founding editor of the international journal Personality and Individual Differences, and wrote about 80 books and more than 1,600 journal articles. With his first wife, Hans Eysenck had a son Michael Eysenck, who is also a psychology professor. He had four children with his second wife, the psychologist Sybil B. G. Eysenck: Gary, Connie, Kevin, and Darrin. Hans and Sybil Eysenck collaborated as psychologists for many years at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, as co-authors and researchers. Sybil Eysenck died in December 2020, and Hans Eysenck died of a brain tumour in a London hospice in 1997. He was an atheist.
The Eysencks' home was at 10 Dorchester Drive, Herne Hill, London, from 1960 until their respective deaths.
Views and their reception
Examples of publications in which Eysenck's views roused controversy include (chronologically): A paper in the 1950s concluding that available data "fail to support the hypothesis that psychotherapy facilitates recovery from neurotic disorder". A chapter in Uses and Abuses of Psychology (1953) entitled "What is wrong with psychoanalysis". The Psychology of Politics (1954) Race, Intelligence and Education (1971) (in the US: The IQ Argument). Sex, Violence and the Media (1978). Astrology – Science or Superstition? (1982). Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire (1985). Smoking, Personality and Stress (1991).
Eysenck's attitude was summarised in his autobiography Rebel with a Cause: "I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he sees it. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that is too bad. Tact and diplomacy are fine in international relations, in politics, perhaps even in business; in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts." He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
The Psychology of Politics In this book, Eysenck suggests that political behavior may be analysed in terms of two independent dimensions: the traditional left-right distinction, and how 'tenderminded' or 'toughminded' a person is. Eysenck suggests that the latter is a result of a person's introversion or extraversion respectively.
Colleagues critiqued the research that formed the basis of this book, on a number of grounds, including the following: Eysenck claims that his findings can be applied to the British middle class as a whole, but the people in his sample were far younger and better educated than the British middle class as a whole. Supporters of different parties were recruited in different ways: Communists were recruited through party branches, fascists in an unspecified manner, and supporters of other parties by giving copies of the questionnaire to his students and telling them to apply it to friends and acquaintances. Scores were obtained by applying the same weight to groups of different sizes. For example, the responses of 250 middle-class supporters of the Liberal Party were given the same weight as those of 27 working-class Liberals. Scores were rounded without explanation, in directions that supported Eysenck's theories.Altemeyer, Bob. Right Wing Authoritarianism (Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press, 1981) 80–91, .
Genetics, race and intelligence
Eysenck advocated a strong influence from genetics and race on IQ differences. Eysenck supported Arthur Jensen's questioning of whether variation in IQ between racial groups was entirely environmental. In opposition to this position, Eysenck was punched in the face by a protester during a talk at the London School of Economics.Roger Pearson, Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe, 2nd edition, Scott-Townsend (1997), , pp. 34–38. Eysenck also received bomb threats and threats to kill his young children.
Eysenck claimed that the media had given people the misleading impression that his views were outside the mainstream scientific consensus. Eysenck cited The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy as showing that there was majority support for all of the main contentions he had put forward, and further claimed that there was no real debate about the matter among relevant scientists.BBC television series Face To Face • Hans Eysenck – broadcast 16 October 1990.
Regarding this controversy, in 1988 S. A. Barnett described Eysenck as a "prolific popularizer" and he exemplified Eysenck's writings on this topic with two passages from his early 1970s books:
Barnett quotes additional criticism of Race, Intelligence and Education from Sandra Scarr, who wrote in 1976 that Eysenck's book was "generally inflammatory" and that there "is something in this book to insult almost everyone except WASPs and Jews." Scarr was equally critical of Eysenck's hypotheses, one of which was the supposition that slavery on plantations had selected African Americans as a less intelligent sub-sample of Africans. Scarr also criticised another statement of Eysenck on the alleged significantly lower IQs of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Greek immigrants in the US relative to the populations in their country of origin. "Although Eysenck is careful to say that these are not established facts (because no IQ tests were given to the immigrants or nonimmigrants in question?") Scarr writes that the careful reader would conclude that "Eysenck admits that scientific evidence to date does not permit a clear choice of the genetic-differences interpretation of black inferiority on intelligence tests," whereas a "quick reading of the book, however, is sure to leave the reader believing that scientific evidence today strongly supports the conclusion that US blacks are genetically inferior to whites in IQ."
Some of Eysenck's later work was funded by the Pioneer Fund, an organization which promoted scientific racism.
Cancer-prone personality Eysenck also received funding for consultation research via the New York legal firm Jacob & Medinger, which was acting on behalf of the tobacco industry. In a talkArchived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine: given in 1994 he mentioned that he asked Reynolds for funding to continue research. Asked what he felt about tobacco industry lawyers being involved in selecting scientists for research projects, he said that research should be judged on its quality, not on who paid for it, adding that he had not personally profited from the funds.Example document here "Memorandum Regarding Professor Eysenck's Research Progress". According to The Independent newspaper, Eysenck received more than £800,000 in this way.Peter pringle, "Eysenck took pounds 800,000 tobacco funds", The Independent, 31 October 1996. Eysenck conducted many studies making claims about the role of personality in cigarette smoking and disease, but he also said "I have no doubt, smoking is not a healthy habit."
His article "Cancer, personality and stress: Prediction and prevention" defines Cancer-prone (Type C) personality. The science behind this claim has now come under public scrutiny in the 2019 King's College London enquiry (see below).
Genetics of personality
In 1951, Eysenck's first empirical study into the genetics of personality was published. It was an investigation carried out with his student and associate Donald Prell, from 1948 to 1951, in which identical (monozygotic) and fraternal (dizygotic) twins, ages 11 and 12, were tested for neuroticism. It is described in detail in an article published in the Journal of Mental Science. Eysenck and Prell concluded: "The factor of neuroticism is not a statistical artifact, but constitutes a biological unit which is inherited as a whole....neurotic predisposition is to a large extent hereditarily determined."The Journal of Mental Health, July 1951, Vol. XCVII, "The Inheritance of Neuroticism: An Experimental Study", H. J. Eysenck and D. B. Prell, p. 402.
Model of personality The two personality dimensions extraversion and neuroticism were described in his 1947 book Dimensions of Personality. It is common practice in personality psychology to refer to the dimensions by the first letters, E and N.
E and N provided a two-dimensional space to describe individual differences in behaviour. Eysenck noted how these two dimensions were similar to the four personality types first proposed by the Greek physician Galen. High N and high E = Choleric type High N and low E = Melancholic type Low N and high E = Sanguine type Low N and low E = Phlegmatic type
The third dimension, psychoticism, was added to the model in the late 1970s, based upon collaborations between Eysenck and his wife, Sybil B. G. Eysenck.H. J. Eysenck and S. B. G. Eysenck (1976). Psychoticism as a Dimension of Personality. London: Hodder & Stoughton.