A “high and far reaching” number of papers and books by Hans Eysenck could be “unsafe,” according to an updated statement from King’s College London, where the psychologist was a professor emeritus when he died in 1997.
A 2019 investigation launched by the U.K. institution found 26 papers coauthored by Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, a social scientist in Germany, were based on questionable data and contained findings that were “incompatible with modern clinical science and the understanding of disease processes.”
For example, the two researchers’ data showed people with a “cancer-prone” personality were more than 120 times as likely to die from the disease as were those with a “healthy” personality, Anthony Pelosi, a longtime Eysenck critic, pointed out in an article preceding the university probe.
Based on its review, the investigation committee recommended King’s inform journal editors that it considered the results and conclusions of the 26 papers “unsafe.” Several retractions, and dozens of expressions of concern, quickly followed, as we reported at the time.
However, some observers, including Eysenck’s biographer Rod Buchanan, criticized the university for leaving out publications written solely by Eysenck, but based on the same suspect data Grossarth-Maticek had collected. Grossarth-Maticek died on November 16.
In November 2019, Buchanan and then-editor of the Journal of Health Psychology David Marks compileda list of more than 80 “suspect” papers and books they believed should be retracted.
“In this case we are up against the seductive allure of claims we’d like to believe are true but aren’t – that tobacco is really not that harmful, at least not by itself, or that we can prevent and cure cancer with some kind of ‘mind work,’ and so on,” Buchanan told us. “This dubious research needs to be flagged with sufficient prominence and transparency wherever it appears to prevent researchers taking it in good faith.”
A 1991 book by Eysenck, for instance, claimed psychosocial factors like stress and personality type were six times as predictive of cancer and heart disease as smoking, cholesterol levels or blood pressure. Pelosi told us the book summarized Eysenck’s work with Grossarth-Maticek and a draft had been sent to tobacco giant Philip Morris International, which helped fund the two researchers’ work.
“It is utterly irresponsible in its presentation of Eysenck and Grossarth-Maticek’s ridiculous claims and in its undermining of public health,” Pelosi said.
In October, six years later after its initial investigation, King’s stated that, “because the number of potentially relevant publications is high and far reaching, including journal articles and books, we cannot with certainty locate and review all relevant sources which are of potential concern. However, based on enquiries to date we can confirm that any publication which relies on the data from those co-authored publications which King’s has already deemed to be unsafe, should also be considered unsafe.”
The university continued:
Any journal or publisher which hosts any publications either sole authored by Professor Hans Eysenck or co-authored by Professor Hans Eysenck with Professor Ronald Grossarth Maticek which rely on data from any of the papers listed in the 2019 Enquiry, is advised to provide a link to this public statement to alert those accessing to these concerns.
“I think this is the minimum that could be done,” Buchanan said. “The introduction to the recommended link ought to specify the nature of these concerns where possible and be displayed prominently for maximum effect.”
Buchanan said he would also have liked to see a link in King’s statement to the list of “suspect” publications he compiled with Marks, which “would also provide guidance if and when publishers don’t take this appropriate action.”
Pelosi welcomed the update from the university and noted its earlier statement about the papers Eysenck and Ronald Grossarth-Maticek authored together “has led to over 20 retractions from the scientific literature. Almost all the journals that were contacted followed their recommendations.” A few did not, however, including Personality and Individual Differences, which Eysenck founded in 1980, as we reported at the time.
Springer Nature did not respond to a request for comment on the new statement and which action, if any, the publisher planned to take on Eysenck’s book.
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Smells like cancel culture. That’s not how science works.
This is exactly how science works. New evidence corrects old errors.
Thank you!
If retracting papers with quetsionable methods and skeptical data is considered “cancel culture”, yeah, why not? What about let’s also change the title of this website to “Cancel Culture Watch”?
Sure it is. Scientific method is a fail safe against junk science. Junk science should not be supported at any level.
Unsafe can be a building. A scientific article could contain a variety of errors or can use fake data or be biased …. but never UNSAFE.
Cancelling junk science corrupted by corporate lobbyists is obviously good and proper. Simply saying “cancel culture” doesn’t short circuit our capacity for critical thought. Sorry.
Forcing the retraction of papers over mere “suspicions”? And those suspicions are based on nothing more than “this clashes with my world view”?! Absolutely despicable.
Science needs an acute correction and it can only come in the form of an inquisition wherein the people mounting these anti-science campaigns are forcefully and permanently ejected from academia, shamed, ridiculed, disgraced, and ideally the public gets to throw rotten tomatoes at their heads before they get deported to China, where they can experience the “equity” they crave.
Dude, who is approving your comments? I’m not sure you even read the article, it doesn’t use the word “suspicion”, nor is this a clash of world views, unless you think the smoking -> cancer link is making some kind of culture-war come-back??
By the way, you really want to “save” science by ejecting people you don’t like from academia, and deporting people who don’t think the way you do to China? Deport from where? Why Academia, that’s not the only place science is conducted? Who said anything about craved equity? What is going on?!
For your information, science (including bad science) is done everywhere, including countries in worse shape than China. Scientific wrongdoers in those countries should be happy to be “deported” to China. And where does your anguish about equity come from? It isn’t mentioned once in this article.
Good to see this review identifying poor quality research.
I get the concept of retracting papers whose conclusions are tenuous or whose methods are sloppy. And I do understand the urge to verify the other works of an author whose work has been retracted. If the author has been sloppy once, they may have been sloppy more than once.
But what I do not get is the concept of unsafe research. I have read papers where I cannot find a single methodological error and yet I did not like the conclusion. If policy were to follow the conclusion, the policy would be undemocratic, for example. But does this make the research unsafe? And what is the connection between research that is unsafe and research that is methodologically so poor as to deserve retraction.
“Unsafe research”: This phrase was only a summary, of course, and was expanded in the report. If you follow a couple of links you can read what the KCL report said (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/assets/news-statements/hans-eysenck-enquiry-final-may-2019.pdf).
Your points are relevant to: “Second, the implausibility of the results presented, many of which show effect sizes virtually unknown in medical science.” Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but as you say are not necessarily wrong.
However, this is more decisive: “First, the validity of the datasets, in terms of recruitment of participants, administration of measures, reliability of outcome ascertainment, biases in data collection, absence of relevant covariates, and selection of cases analysed in each article.”
To really make your mind up on these issues, you would need to study the reference provided in the report. But yes, some published research is “unsafe” in the sense that its conclusions are so poorly evidenced that they are unreliable.
Thanks Raphael can you describe an example of not liking the conclusion despite the methodological rigour?
For a detailed account of the errors in the work by Eysenck that led to retractions, you can watch these lectures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAH0awoK3aY. Nothing to do with cancel culture and everything to do with fraudulent data.
The key is to know if the data were fraudulent or methodically invalid. If this is the case then a retraction is appropriate. Sadly it is possible to falsify data very easily and like most things in life, the system is based on honesty. This perhaps highlight the importance of science being funded independently and not by those ( such as drug companies or tobacco companies) who have a vested interest in the results going a certain direction. Our politicians need to heed this principle also whether they are the UK prime minister accepting suits and spectacles from a wealthy businessman or Farage accepting vast sums from the petrochemical industry.
Why was the Hans Eysenck problem allowed to fester for so long? Since the 1960s!!!!
FYI: I took soph non-major psych at Michigan State in 1966. The prof commented on the unreliability of Eysenck’s work. He stated that math errors in his papers had the sign to support his conclusions.
I am not a lawyer but I was not thinking about liable suits in 1966. But it would have been easy to defend a suit by Eysenck regarding math errors.
To repeat, the Eysenck problem still persists including lots secondary and tertiary literature.
Psychiatry and psychology are both pseudo-sciences, what do you expect?Eysenck was mad as his patients! Some cretin at the The Maudsley hospital once introduced his theory called ‘token economy’.Most of their research is flawed, just like their treatments. Just stay away from those insane places.
Look up the definition of pseudo-science and try again, Barry.
Barry, token economy is a method of modifying behavior that has little to do with Eysenck’s trait theory.
The proverb “Once a thief, always a thief” could be applied to scientific misconduct. It is so easy to fake data, that people will do it again and again. It is reasonable to erase anything of theirs from the scientific record that can’t be shown to be unlikely to have been faked. I would have some extreme doubts on being able to apply psychometric testing to people in Yugoslavia, and then follow them up. I expect a reanalysis of the data would show a total death rate that was unbelievably high for the two groups combined.
To give you an idea of what we’re up against with Eysenck, let me quote the man himself, in his defense of another fraudster:
“The first findings in trying to substantiate a theoretical discovery are never clear-cut … But enemies would seize upon these anomalies to destroy his theory. Obviously the way to overcome this problem is simply to make sure the data fit the theory!”
Hans J. Eysenck
(p. 126, 1995, Burt and hero and anti-hero: A greek tragedy. In N. J. Mackintosh, Burt: fraud or framed? pp. 111-129, Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press)
Make sure that the data fit the theory? That’s the way to go? Let me contrast that with a radically different point of view:
“…if my experience or the facts do not fit the theory, I tend to rethink the theory rather than try to explain away the fact as due to bias, chance, or any of the favorite devices so often employed by upholders of tradition. My primary loyalty is to the phenomenon, to the empirical fact — and if it messes up somebody’s theory, so much the worse for the theory.”
David C. McClelland
(p. 28, 1984, Motives, personality, and society. Selected papers. New York: Praeger.)
When I was at medical school I remember one of the psychology lecturers, medical students had a short psychology course, longer for psychiatry, talking about the Cyril Burt problematic publications. These came to light before I read the newspapers, so were new to me at medical school.
https://time.com/archive/6845615/behavior-a-taint-of-scholarly-fraud/
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/12/16/archives/a-dr-strangelove-of-the-mind.html
“In 1972, Prof. Leon Kamin of Princeton University began the critical scrutiny that has now exposed not only Burt but the whole deplorable web of ideas about psychotechnology within which Cyril Burt’s life looms so large.”
A recent re-appraisal.
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/rethinking-psychology-gone-wrong
Guess who one of his PhD students was?
Yup, Hans Eysenck.
When the Cyril Burt problematic data came to light in 1972 is lineage should have been checked.
I agree that Burt’s data was synthetic, not actually obtained, and Eysenck’s reliance on Grossarth-Maticek’s unbelievable data was completely unjustifiable, but consistent with his biases to overstate the role of personality (his role in tobacco litigation is shameful). However, I’m an academic grandchild of Eysenck; my supervisor was one of his students. How far should the taint go?
There shouldn’t be ANY taint whatsoever. Every scientist is responsible for his/her own conduct; we don’t inherit the sins (or the sublimity) of our intellectual ancestors.
PhDs have supervisors. The PhD does not come out of thin air.
An internal supervisor, an external supervisor, perhaps a small committee, will determine the direction the thesis work will go in.
At the beginning scientist will not be responsible for their work, but guided.
Many never have an idea on the head, which has not been put there by somebody else. PhDs will often have papers with their PhD supervisors. They could be checked for a start. Every paper should be checked until there are no problematic data. That’s a general point, which applies here as well.
When central figures in a field come unstuck of course there will be ramification, or there should be. Are we all supposed to go on as if nothing happened? Is it supposed to be a feudal/aristocratic self-supporting system, or based on the data?
There should be audits of all scientific output. If people complain that there are too many papers to audit, then there are too many papers in the first place.
Whole fields can be discredited, but as long as universities can make money out of it they will carry on. WWII was not enough to put an end to it.
Cyril Burt was in the lineage of eugenicists, as was Hans Eysenck.
Not just the social sciences can be dishonourable, but the exact sciences too.
Why are we reading these pages?
If someone receives their principal training in research from a fraud, it’s pretty plausible that they’ve been trained to be frauds themselves.
@If: This is a highly problematic assertion. If this were true, then we’re back to collective punishment and would assert that “something sticks”, no matter if a person has quietly distanced her/himself from the example of her/his advisor or even blown the whistle on the advisor. And it would assume, for similar collective-attribution reasons, that intellectual descendants of honest advisors are incapable of fraud themselves. The pages of RT are full of examples of the former (people blowing the whistle, distancing themselves) and the latter (i.e., first-time fraudsters whose advisors set a very different example). So please be mindful that each case needs to be assessed in its own right.