Oct 30, 2019 07:00 PM
https://cosmosmagazine.com/society/is-th...f-all-time
INTRO: In February of this year, a critical review in the Journal of Health Psychology prompted one of its editors to publish open letters calling for a formal investigation of one of the most influential and heavily cited psychologists of all time, the oft controversial Hans Eysenck. Recently, Retraction Watch managed to lay hands on the report of such a formal investigation carried out in May by Eysenck’s long-time employer, King’s College London. Taken together, these documents point to what Anthony Pelosi, a psychiatrist with the UK’s National Health Service in Glasgow and Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow, calls “one of the worst scientific scandals of all time.”
Hans Eysenck is revered as one of the greatest psychologists in history, his fame built on his work concerning intelligence and personality testing, known as psychometrics. A 2002 paper published in the journal Review of General Psychology, ranking the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, saw him come in at number 13. Perhaps a more telling measure is that he came third in the rankings of the “Most Frequently Cited in the Professional Psychological Journal Literature”. Ahead of him was Jean Piaget in second place and Sigmund Freud in first, making Eysenck, at the time of his death in 1997, the most cited living psychologist.
Yet his career has, for many decades, been dogged by controversy. He dove into the wars over the connection between IQ and race and alarmingly ended up on the academic advisory council of Mankind Quarterly, a journal commonly seen as a vehicle for dressing up racist ideology in the respectable garb of academia. He long maintained the hereditability of IQ and personality traits and was a supporter of the work of people like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, the somewhat infamous authors of The Bell Curve, a book that amongst other things makes correlations between race and IQ in the US. This was a strange course to take for a refugee from a Nazi Germany he vehemently despised and whose own Jewish grandmother died in a concentration camp.
Eysenck also published work validating aspects of astrology to do with the correlation between personality and astrological signs and was seemingly rather partial to parapsychology and the world of psychics. But now another aspect of his work has come in for serious scrutiny, the research he carried out with his junior collaborator Ronald Grossath-Maticek on relationships between personality and fatal illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Making the situation worse are the links, including financial, between Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek and the tobacco industry.
Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek together published a large number of papers that explored the idea that personality was a serious risk factor in various forms of heart disease and cancer. Famously, some of their research concluded that personality factors were six times more likely to increase the risk of lung cancer than smoking was. This area of Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s research has attracted critical attention for some time, with a storm of critical publications gracing journals in the 1990s and, indeed, an entire 1991 issue of Psychological Inquiry was turned over to the topic.Nonetheless, these issues have remained unexplored and the pair’s work still lives in the scientific literature, remaining both well-cited and influential.
Pelosi's thoroughly damning review of Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s research was not his first... (MORE - details)
INTRO: In February of this year, a critical review in the Journal of Health Psychology prompted one of its editors to publish open letters calling for a formal investigation of one of the most influential and heavily cited psychologists of all time, the oft controversial Hans Eysenck. Recently, Retraction Watch managed to lay hands on the report of such a formal investigation carried out in May by Eysenck’s long-time employer, King’s College London. Taken together, these documents point to what Anthony Pelosi, a psychiatrist with the UK’s National Health Service in Glasgow and Honorary Professor at the University of Glasgow, calls “one of the worst scientific scandals of all time.”
Hans Eysenck is revered as one of the greatest psychologists in history, his fame built on his work concerning intelligence and personality testing, known as psychometrics. A 2002 paper published in the journal Review of General Psychology, ranking the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, saw him come in at number 13. Perhaps a more telling measure is that he came third in the rankings of the “Most Frequently Cited in the Professional Psychological Journal Literature”. Ahead of him was Jean Piaget in second place and Sigmund Freud in first, making Eysenck, at the time of his death in 1997, the most cited living psychologist.
Yet his career has, for many decades, been dogged by controversy. He dove into the wars over the connection between IQ and race and alarmingly ended up on the academic advisory council of Mankind Quarterly, a journal commonly seen as a vehicle for dressing up racist ideology in the respectable garb of academia. He long maintained the hereditability of IQ and personality traits and was a supporter of the work of people like Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, the somewhat infamous authors of The Bell Curve, a book that amongst other things makes correlations between race and IQ in the US. This was a strange course to take for a refugee from a Nazi Germany he vehemently despised and whose own Jewish grandmother died in a concentration camp.
Eysenck also published work validating aspects of astrology to do with the correlation between personality and astrological signs and was seemingly rather partial to parapsychology and the world of psychics. But now another aspect of his work has come in for serious scrutiny, the research he carried out with his junior collaborator Ronald Grossath-Maticek on relationships between personality and fatal illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. Making the situation worse are the links, including financial, between Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek and the tobacco industry.
Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek together published a large number of papers that explored the idea that personality was a serious risk factor in various forms of heart disease and cancer. Famously, some of their research concluded that personality factors were six times more likely to increase the risk of lung cancer than smoking was. This area of Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s research has attracted critical attention for some time, with a storm of critical publications gracing journals in the 1990s and, indeed, an entire 1991 issue of Psychological Inquiry was turned over to the topic.Nonetheless, these issues have remained unexplored and the pair’s work still lives in the scientific literature, remaining both well-cited and influential.
Pelosi's thoroughly damning review of Eysenck and Grossath-Maticek’s research was not his first... (MORE - details)