Verdicts on Hans Eysenck and the fluxing context of British psychology

Abstract

An account is provided of the historical context of the work one of the best-known figures in British psychology in the 20th century, Hans Eysenck. Recently some of this has come under critical scrutiny, especially in relation to claims of data rigging in his model of smoking and morbidity, produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. The article places that controversy, and others associated with Eysenck, in the longer context of the shifting forms of epistemological and political legitimacy within British psychology in the past hundred years. Eysenck was both lionised and disparaged during his life and after his death. This account explores that ambiguity in order to discern the challenge for British psychology to maintain disciplinary coherence. An understanding of this fluxing historical picture is guided by the meta-theoretical resource of critical realism.

Introduction

One among many entries into historical understanding is an exploration of biographies. We can appraise the latter in relation to their situating context dialectically. Biographies can reveal their time and place, and time and place can furnish an understanding of biographies (Mills, 1959; Sartre, 1957).

Below, biographical aspects of the work of Hans Eysenck will be examined with that dialectical relationship in mind. Eysenck has been described as one of the most divisive figures to have emerged within British psychology (Buchanan, 2010). Apart from Buchanan's appraisal of Eysenck, his role in leading British clinical psychology has been summarised well by Hall (2007). This article will draw on their work in part, to summarise some broad points for the reader, who may be new to the contention about Eysenck's professional life. However, its main focus will be on the implications of his ambiguous role within British eugenics and its challenges in the middle of the 20th century. In particular, the (counter-intuitive) force of environmentalism within these eugenic debates will be highlighted.

This article offers some pointers to explain not only that Eysenck's divisive character but also the epistemological and political field that judged him while he was alive, and has continued to do so since his death in 1997. He left Germany in 1934 voluntarily with the rise of Hitler. His mother was Jewish, but he was to play down this fact in favour of explaining his migration as a result of his liberal and defiant outlook. (His maternal grandmother, who raised him, died in a concentration camp.) As an ‘enemy alien’, he was interned by the British for a while. Despite this, after 1945 he went on to establish an industrious and high-profile career as both an academic and a public intellectual.

As a broad indicator of his ambiguous reputation, at the height of his career he was never awarded a Fellowship of the British Psychological Society (BPS); nor did he occupy a senior position in that organisation. This was despite him being a prolific public intellectual who encouraged the general public to take an interest is psychology as a new science (Eysenck, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1962, 1965a).

By 1950 he was head of psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP), and this began a wary relationship with its medical director, Aubrey Lewis. At that time the IoP was a free-standing college of the University of London, with its clinical wing in the Maudsley Hospital in South-East London. Subsequently, in the year of his death, when he was still an emeritus professor at the IoP, the latter was incorporated into King’s College London (KCL). This organisation setting has some bearing on events to be described below in terms of discerning the standing of Eysenck's academic work.

A number of strands will now be described about the above sketch of his arrival in Britain and his work. Once these points are expanded, the framework of critical realism will be used to make sense of them and the seeming contradictions they contain in their historical context.

British empiricism (and positivism)

Despite his self-characterisation as a ‘rebel’ (Eysenck, 1997b), Eysenck was actually a conformist, within the cultural context of a post-war British academy that adopted him and other ‘white’ (conservative) rather than ‘red’ (radical) émigrés. The latter group migrated elsewhere, such as Scandinavia and North America. By and large the conservative migrant intellectual labour, of which Eysenck was a part, played a role in the reinvigoration of British empiricism, which by its own logic has had a de-theorising tendency (Hearnshaw, 1964).

These migrant intellectuals reversed that flagging empiricist British tradition (Anderson, 1968) or what E. P. Thompson, less pejoratively, called the British ‘empirical idiom’ (Thompson, 1965). An anomaly in this revitalisation tendency, which was largely an artefact of the Jewish displacement from Germany in the 1930s, was the location in North London of versions of Continental hermeneutics (schools of psychoanalysis). This was to play a part in the dynamics of how British psychology evolved during the 1950s and 1960s, including part of the Eysenckian canon.

Despite his attributed status of being an ‘enemy alien’, Eysenck became a loyal defender of British empiricism and its brand of positivist psychology favoured in 1904 by James Ward and William Rivers. This was their first editorial of the British Journal of Psychology setting out the stall for the new discipline, loosening itself from the constraints of philosophy:

Psychology[,] which till recently was known amongst us chiefly as Mental Philosophy and was widely concerned with problems of a more or less speculative and transcendental character, has now at length achieved the position of a positive science; one of special interest to the philosopher, no doubt, but still independent of his control, possessing its own methods, its own specific problems and a distinct standpoint altogether its own. ‘Ideas’ in the philosophical sense do not fall within its scope: its inquiries are restricted entirely to ‘facts’. (Ward and Rivers, 1904; emphasis added)

Quite how these new scientific psychologists would generate their facts was left open. In practice in one direction, mainly in Oxford and Cambridge, there was a version of physics-mimicking experimentalism. By contrast, in London the statistical method predominated, championed by Pearson and Spearman at University College London (UCL).

Later Eysenck was to express concern about this separation and his hope for a reconciliation (Eysenck, 1997a). This statement from Eysenck is relevant today, as his work is still being reviewed. It is worth noting the very similar rhetorical flourish to that of Ward and Rivers, just cited, from over 80 years previously:

I always felt that a scientist owes the world only one thing, and that is the truth as he [sic] 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. (Eysenck, 1997b: 229)

The early orthodoxy of British psychology disabled its proponents from pre-empirical reflection, as the discipline cut its ties with philosophy (pace Ward and Rivers), while paradoxically also adhering devoutly to the metaphysics of empiricism and positivism (Smedslund, 2016; Snoeyenbos and Putney, 1980). The British discipline then joined the dubious global search in Western psychology for the ‘covering laws’, which purportedly hold for the conduct and experience of all people in all times and places (Hempel, 1942; Moore, 1985). Reactions against this naïve scientific approach, which presumed fixity of the world and its attendant covering laws, came from Karl Popper's critical rationalism and then other philosophical objections in psychology. These post-Popperian critiques of positivism came from both postmodernism (Kvale, 1992) and critical realism (Pilgrim, 2020).

By the time the postmodern turn of the 1980s began to shape academic psychology, the discipline was thrown into epistemological incoherence, as older certainties were scorned. Thereafter it had to rely predominantly on a commitment to methodological rigour, in order to defend its unitary reputation and academic plausibility, described by critical psychologists as ‘methodologism’ (Gao, 2014). Psychological theories were by then innumerable and often incommensurable. Accordingly, today the BPS in its official statements describes itself, inevitably and vaguely, as a ‘broad church’. Academic departments contain psychologists with a wide range of theoretical and methodological preferences or orientations.

At the start of Eysenck's self-confident career, around the time of the Second Word War, the naïve realism of Ward and Rivers was taken for granted, as British psychology established itself on the cusp of natural and social science. By the end of his career, that picture of assured epistemological legitimacy, offered by the recent traditional confidence in the bedfellows of British empiricism and positivism, was breaking down substantially.

The rejection of psychoanalysis and ambivalence about the therapeutic role

Eysenck courted controversy in a range of ways. Sometimes this involved a volte face in his strategic guidance to the professional wing of British psychology. For example, when he set up the clinical course at the IoP, he insisted that psychologists should not be therapists on the grounds that therapy was value-led (which it is). Instead they were told to be disinterested scientists and psychometricians (Eysenck, 1949). The first 18-month course in clinical psychology he set up simply taught testing; today this is only minor theme in a three-year clinical doctorate programme.

However, by 1958 Eysenck reversed his view and made a bid for legitimacy for psychologists to treat neurosis using behaviour therapy, based upon Russian and American learning theory (Eysenck and Gwynne-Jones, 1958). Broadly conceived, this was a version of applied methodological behaviourism, to distinguish it from radical behaviourism, which offered itself as a form of philosophy, not just psychology (cf. Skinner, 1974). Thereafter he maintained that psychologists should be experts on neurosis, leaving psychosis to be treated by psychiatrists (Eysenck, 1975).

For Eysenck scientific facts in psychology were derived from experimentalism and an actuarial approach to individual differences (derived from psychometric testing). This required that he embarked on an attack on depth psychology (which he described as being like reading sheep's entrails). His initial rejection of therapeutic work (Eysenck, 1949) was prompted by two points for him. First, the growth of clinical psychology in the USA (which he visited to appraise) relied largely upon a psychoanalytical approach. Second, its value-led character (noted above) was at odds with his assumption of the positivist principle of scientific value-neutrality, traceable to the fact-value separation of David Hume.

When he altered his view of clinical psychologists now entering the therapeutic role, after 1958, he redoubled his attacks on psychoanalysis. Its authority as a basis for psychological therapy needed to be subverted for Eysenck and his sympathetic colleagues. This was manifest both in his writings on the topic (Eysenck, 1985) and in his role, with colleagues at the IoP, in trying to wrest control of the British Journal of Medical Psychology in 1958. This was the journal of the Medical Section of the BPS, dominated by medical psychoanalysts, and the IoP group tried to enter it as new members en masse. The dispute about this tactical entryism became so acrimonious that the Council of the BPS suspended the business of the Section for a while (Pilgrim and Treacher, 1991).

Conformity to the Galtonian tradition about inherited individual differences

Eysenck's accommodation of biogenetic and environmentalist reasoning was not new in the eugenic tradition of his host country. That reconciliation was apparently resolved mathematically in the first phase of the movement in the early 20th century by Ronald Fisher (1918, 1930). However, his view of separating genetic and environmentalist variance was queried by the experimental biologist and anti-eugenicist Lancelot Hogben, who argued for the methodologically challenging and inseparable unity of gene–environment interactions (Tabery, 2008). Hogben was an important figure in the work at the London School of Economics (LSE) to be noted below. He was appointed as Professor of Social Biology there in 1930, in preference to Fisher (Tabery and Sarkar, 2015). Fisher presently succeeded Karl Pearson as head of the department of eugenics at UCL in 1933.

The nature/nurture debate quickly resurfaced in a new guise with two emergent positions within British eugenics. The first were the conservative followers of Galton, linked to work by psychologists at UCL (Galton, 1869, 1884, 1881). There he bequeathed the first chair in eugenics, taken in 1913 by the mathematician Karl Pearson. Galton's views were affirmed and extended at UCL in their professorial roles by him, as well as Charles Spearman and Cyril Burt (Burt, 1909, 1912; Pearson, 1905, 1904; Spearman, 1904).

The relationship between the UCL eugenics department and the Eugenics Education Society (EES) was ambivalent (Farrall, 2019). Galton was aligned with each, and he defended his protégé Pearson whenever he was attacked by other EES members (Forrest, 1974). In turn Pearson was hostile to the EES because he considered it politically damaging to the cause of eugenics. Pearson separated the research aspects of eugenics and the rhetorical tactics required to alter policy in his favour (Porter, 2004).

Thus even early debates between eugenicists were not harmonious and this prefigured later adaptations and differences within the British movement. For example, differences were obvious strategically in the 1930s about sterilisation, which divided Conservative and Labour eugenics supporters. A particular undermining feature for the first group was that it was led by the pro-Nazi George Pitt-Rivers (Hart and Carr, 2015).

In line with these inner divisions in the eugenic movement, UCL contained not just Pearson and Spearman but those who were reformist eugenicists and who anticipated an increasing incorporation of environmentalist ideas (gene–environment interactionism). Indeed the third Galton Chair in Eugenics at UCL was taken by the psychiatrist Lionel Penrose, whose arguments (despite his formal role in the EES and his job title) became increasingly hostile to mainstream eugenics in the Galtonian tradition (Penrose, 1953). Also the work of the Marxist J. B. S. Haldane, who became Professor of Biometry at UCL in 1936 and studied population genetics, considered that eugenic measures were only defensible after demonstrable political reforms were effected to eliminate social inequalities.

Apart from these differences within UCL, at another University of London college, the LSE, there was a clear reformist version of eugenics emerging. They were exploring how social policy might be developed to maximise human potential. This took the focus away from a psychological discourse, of individual differences, and towards a political discourse about societal changes. Thus, as Renwick (2019) explains, ‘counter-intuitively’ eugenics was reframed from being a biogenetic to an environmentalist political enterprise. The biologists and social scientists at the LSE initiated new disciplinary forms, within this version of biosocial science. These became codified now as ‘sociology’ and ‘social policy’ in the British academy.

An indication of the time lag between these two versions of British eugenics (mainstream Galtonian versus reformist) was their disciplinary impact. The British Sociological Association (BSA) was formed 50 years later than the BPS. The committees in the LSE working on the British population were the immediate structural precursors of the BSA.

The problem of genetic tramlines and concessions to environmentalism

This environmentalist shift occurred in a global context of diminished enthusiasm for what had been eugenic orthodoxies common at the turn of the 20th century, across the political spectrum. During and after the Second World War, eugenics had become problematic, for a number of reasons:

Social psychiatrists reviewing the post-traumatic consequences of two ‘World Wars’ and the impact of poverty and mass unemployment in the interwar period, recognised that a narrow biogenetic explanation for poor mental health was inadequate (Pilgrim, 2008). For example, in the First World War working-class volunteers and ‘officers and gentlemen’ were breaking down with predictable regularity in the trenches. Rates of breakdown were actually higher in the second group, yet these were supposedly ‘England's finest blood’ (Stone, 1986). The case for environmental explanations for human conduct could not now be gainsaid. Some eugenicists such as Aubrey Lewis (the first medical director of the IoP, and Eysenck's manager) argued for biopsychosocial interactions to account for mental health status, thereby rejecting bio-reductionism in human science. That rejection and his own concerns about the German eugenic experiment begun in the 1930s (see next point) were not a view shared by some colleagues at the IoP, such as Eliot Slater. Their accounts can be compared in the Eugenics Review (Lewis, 1934; cf. Slater, 1936).

Nazi race science linked eugenics to anti-democratic and racist policies that were to culminate in genocide. The methods of mass killing were tested initially on medical cases of chronic mental or physical disability, who were deemed to be ‘devoid of life worth living’, which was a pre-Nazi concern of the German Medical Association (Binding and Hoche, 1920; Meyer, 1988; Weindling, 1989). Moreover, the Nazi version of eugenics could not be depicted as an isolated case that justified mass murder. In the USA, during the 1940s, psychiatrists also rehearsed the case for mass killings of incurably psychotic patients (Joseph, 2005).

Although British eugenics was dominated more by considerations of class than race (and this was a trend not a clear distinction) this offended many on the left, including leaders of the Labour Party. They were concerned to defend the rights of the poor and to improve their lot. Eugenic policies had encouraged a dismissal of an underclass, or what Marx called the ‘lumpenproletariat’, and others the ‘residuum’, with a broad assumption (Mazumdar, 1980). This was that madness, idiocy, criminality, prostitution, epilepsy, and alcohol abuse were reducible to an inferior gene pool.

The scientific pretensions about statistical precision and empirical detachment barely obscured eugenics being a value-driven political movement. Should the poor be sterilised or those with physical and mental disabilities be killed? Should ‘good stock’ be encouraged to breed more? These were value-based questions. Mathematics is not ethics. ‘Disinterested’ knowledge is totemic for positivism but also untenable because all science (but especially human science) is a social activity and so value-laden. Popper recognised this point when displacing positivism with critical rationalism, as did those who extended and debated the implications of his philosophical position about science and values (Bhaskar, 1993; Habermas, 1987; Popper, 1959, 1962).

The final point emphasises an uneven consideration of eugenicists about values. On the one hand, those like Eysenck and Burt in the Galtonian tradition, simply took it for granted that human strengths and weaknesses were genetically ‘wired in’, and so the goal of eugenics needed little explication. On the other hand, those in the LSE revisionist group were more explicit about the point of eugenics, as they say here:

The end is a higher level of mental and physical health, an increase in the biological efficiency of human beings; the means are such measures as tend to improve the inborn qualities of future generations, to raise the proportion of those who are ‘well born’. Eugenicists seek a higher level of health—i.e., of ‘wholeness’—as an end in itself, because the human personality is an end in itself, and because they wish to see human beings in the mass become more completely human. They wish to bring about an increased inborn capacity for ‘wholeness’, and also a fuller realization for that capacity by creating conditions in which inborn qualities can attain full expression. (Titmuss and Lafitte, 1942; cited in Renwick, 2019: 138)

The traditional Galtonian emphasis was on quality (the impairments linked to ‘poor stock’ and their assumed tainted genes). An example of this in practice were moves in Britain to sterilise those described as mentally deficient (Thomson, 1998). By contrast, the concerns of the environmentalists at the LSE were on quantity: how might the British population be regulated to encourage a better life for more people?

This differential point about eugenicists engineering one group of humans to be more fertile than others was thus mainly about social class in Britain. However, by the 1930s the disconcerting comparison was in relation to race in Germany. Also, although race was a minor theme in British eugenics, it was not completely absent. From its early days, there had been concerns about weakening of the British stock not just by the underclass but also by alien tainting (Down, 1866; Mazumdar, 1991; Mott, 1912; Stone, 2001). In the context then of a wider compromise within British eugenics between genetic determination and the shaping role of the environment, Eysenck can be seen not as the rebel he claimed to be. Those compromises had already been set out less controversially by both the LSE reformists, as well as Penrose and Haldane at UCL.

Within British psychology Eysenck's version of that compromise was clear when he instigated two important journals, still popular today. The first was Behaviour Research and Therapy, founded by Eysenck in 1963 and co-edited with Jack Rachman, and the second was Personality and Individual Differences, which he founded in 1980. In 1983 Eysenck became the first president of the linked organisation, the International Society for the Study of Personality and Individual Differences.

Whatever else these journals have represented as epistemological products, it has certainly not been rebelliousness. The first has reflected the standard environmentalism of an eclectic and applied methodological behaviourism. The second has reflected the Galtonian tradition of eugenics promoted by Eysenck's PhD supervisor, Cyril Burt, in the UCL tradition of Pearson and Spearman noted earlier.

What Burt and Eysenck had in common (in the midst of claims against them both of data rigging) was the tendency, in Galtonian followers, to beg the question, in its proper sense of making or importing an unchecked presumption in a knowledge claim. This point was made about Burt's work by his friend but ultimately critical biographer Lesley Hearnshaw, who incidentally also a member of the British Eugenics Society:

Burt had a good cause to defend, but he made two major mistakes. He used doubtful means in the defence of his position; and in defining intelligence as ‘innate cognitive ability’ he in effect begged the question. He should have restricted his definition to ‘general cognitive ability’, leaving the issue of its innateness and its degree to be determined empirically. Had he done this he would have avoided a good deal of trouble and criticism. (Hearnshaw, 1979: 63; emphasis in original)

That same weakness of begging the question can be identified in Eysenck's pre-empirical biogenetic starting point. It led to both Burt and Eysenck being hostages to fortune (Mackintosh, 1995; Marks, 2019). Both were to be accused of creating, massaging, or selectively interpreting data in order to confirm their epistemological presuppositions (see below).

We can also note a wider sense of ‘begging the question’ in psychology, which is of the poor pre-empirical examination of theoretical assumptions and hypothesis testing. The loss of capacity for pre-empirical reflection in British psychology was noted above, in the wake of the lead given by Ward and Rivers. This point then goes beyond the tendency of eugenic psychologists alone, like Eysenck and Burt, to beg the question or commit the ontic fallacy. The latter refers to making an assumption in advance about the general self-evident facticity of a psychological phenomenon and then seeking and finding confirmatory practical evidence in particular cases (Pilgrim, 2020).

Provocative claims about homosexuality, race, and smoking

Eysenck's commitment during the 1960s to deconditioning techniques led to his support of aversion therapy for homosexuality. Given the emergence in the early 1970s of gay liberation and the imminent removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (American Psychiatric Association, 1973), this led to protest. For example, the young gay activist Peter Tatchell attended a learning event with Eysenck and his psychiatric colleague Isaac Marks, from the IoP, and challenged their viewpoint. At the lecture at St Thomas’ Hospital London in 1972, Eysenck argued that ‘aversion therapy is used for the patient's own good.… It can change the emotions, where the person himself cannot change them of his own free will.… By associating emotions with pain or fear, the emotional response can be de-conditioned’ (quoted in Tatchell, n.d.).

This highlighted the normative role of applied psychology, which is the result of the fact-value separation in naïve realism. Eysenck took it as a given that extant cultural norms were legitimate and self-evident (doxa) and their transgression warranted corrective responses using aversion therapy for the patient's ‘own good’. This ideological begging the question extended to the matter of race. This, like homosexuality, was being valorised by New Social Movements in the wake of the American civil rights campaigns of the 1960s, which has been the basis of the wider phenomenon of identity politics with us today.

For their part, eugenicists in the early part of the 20th century, a position kept alive by Eysenck and many others, simply presumed that race reflected a pre-empirical reality. Today the biological ontology of race has now been dismissed as an unscientific assumption (Rutherford, 2019), leaving the social ontology of race (usually based upon skin colour) as a real enough basis for acceptance or social exclusion, as well as the driver for both racialised policies and anti-racist campaigns.

Eysenck, like his predecessors Pearson, Spearman, and Fisher, biologically reified race and within that reification there was the assumption of white superiority. By contrast, Penrose was explicitly an anti-racist. He predated Rutherford in the strong claim that race has no meaningful biological ontology and so is an unworthy topic for scientific examination. He presented this case to the UNESCO in 1950 in their inquiry into the ‘race question’ (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/jaf82fcb; https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000128291).

Eysenck relished the heat about race and IQ, which hinged on arguments within the Galtonian tradition of individual differences and their assumed genetic origins. Within this, Eysenck joined in prompting the outrage of anti-racists, which was provoked in unison with sympathetic colleagues, like Arthur Jensen (Eysenck's student) and later Philip Rushton (Eysenck, 1971; Jensen, 1969; Rushton, 1995). Rushton's work has in recent years been subject to retraction by journals, though not to the same extent affecting Eysenck, to be discussed now.

These controversies reflected the cultural conservativism of Eysenck's viewpoint more generally. Not only did this lead to protests from left wing activists about his reactionary role as a scientist, but it also provoked concern from the medical establishment in relation to newly favoured public health messages about smoking. When Eysenck's work is appraised across a range of topics, we can see that his value position was increasingly out of step with post-war progressive political discourse, especially after the 1960s.

However, unlike the protests on race and homosexuality, the provocation about smoking was different, because judgements about Eysenck's stance were deferred (and arguably institutionally obstructed) largely until after his death. In 2019 KCL investigated Eysenck's work about smoking and health, most of which had been a collaborative reworking of the data generated by the Yugoslavian sociologist Ronald Grossarth-Maticek in the 1980s. The investigation was instigated by a complaint from the editor of the Journal of Health Psychology, David Marks, in the wake of the concerns expressed by the Scottish psychiatrist Anthony Pelosi about the studies. In 1995 Pelosi had requested that both the BPS and Eysenck's employers, the IoP, should investigate the matter. However, at that time both declined his request.

In 1997 (the year of Eysenck's death) the IoP was incorporated into KCL; hence their ownership of his legacy, when it was later reviewed. Pelosi and his colleagues, summarised the case against Eysenck when lobbying for the reviews (Craig, Pelosi, and Tourish, 2021; Marks, 2019; Pelosi, 2019). Both were eventually triggered by the latter author's intervention, as is clear here from the summary statement from KCL:

In response to an open letter to Professor Edward Byrne, President and Principal of King's College London, from David F Marks, Editor of the Journal of Health Psychology, and subsequent publication in the Journal of Health Psychology, King's convened a committee with an independent chair, to examine research papers authored by Professor Hans Eysenck with Professor Ronald Grossarth-Maticek, which named the Institute of Psychiatry as an institutional affiliation. The open letter stated that the publications of ‘immediate concern’ were those jointly authored by Eysenck and Grossarth-Maticek. These formed the baseline data and were the remit of the enquiry committee. The committee found the results of the papers to be unsafe, and King's wrote to the editors of the journals concerned recommending retraction. (‘King's College London Enquiry’, n.d.)

The Eysenck/Grossarth-Maticek thesis was that a direct link between smoking and morbidity was not proven. Instead, their argument went, the genetic proneness to both cancer and addictive habits intersected with any possible pathogenic content of tobacco. During the 1990s a series of papers, in a variety of journals emerged querying the statistical plausibility of the data claiming to justify this model. Pelosi et al. collated their material to make their case for the review of the safety of the findings of Eysenck and Grossarth-Maticek. In particular Eysenck (1991) provoked many criticisms of his methodological approach to the topic (Pelosi, 2019).

The delay in reviewing Eysenck's work, while he was alive, by the IoP and the BPS may have been inflected by anxieties of those in power about a bullish and controversial figure in the profession of British clinical psychology. Craig et al. (2021) offered their view of the reasons for delay, related to the tension in organisations between their reputational integrity, on the one hand, and the risk to this of intellectual probity when examining adverse events, on the other.

In the wake of the KCL investigation, most of the journals informed of the findings retracted the work of Eysenck and Grossarth-Maticek. To date eight journals have retracted a total of 20 articles. Four journals have looked through their archives and attached expressions of concern to a total of 65 co-authored papers by Eysenck, on topics other than fatal diseases. One of these expressions of concern dates back as far as 1946.

We can note here as part of the uneven empirical picture about retraction, some publishers have been more zealous than others. For example, Behaviour Research and Therapy have been keen to retract suspect articles from Eysenck, whereas they have been retained in Personality and Individual Differences. Despite this uneven approach from journals or their publishers, the sheer volume of problematic articles, which are now in line for retraction, renders Eysenck's output a standout case.

Taking money from the tobacco industry as Eysenck did was consistent with his contrarian stance in psychology (see later). Whether that fact alone would make him the eventual (i.e. current) focus of critical attention is open to question; the replication crisis and identity politics lobbying may have also played their role in bringing his work into the spotlight of look-back exercises. However, note that Eysenck's work on race was already under attack from anti-racist activists in the 1970s, whereas identity politics activists have only very recently focused on his older predecessors in the eugenic tradition (Pearson and Galton; Pilgrim, 2022).

By the 1950s, it was already becoming evident in public health research that smoking was linked to both cancer and heart disease. At this point Eysenck spotted an opportunity to become a naysayer in the limelight. During the 1960s Eysenck's work was funded by the tobacco industry, which he duly acknowledged (Eysenck, 1963). After 1983 (now retired) he collaborated with Grossarth-Maticek, taking on and promoting the Yugoslav's ongoing research. This was largely self-financed because the tobacco industry was wary of his legitimacy.

The matter of the impact of industry finance on Eysenck's stance went largely unrecognised until it was addressed by Buchanan (2010). Even then, the long-standing complaints from Pelosi and others still did not lead to either the BPS or Eysenck's old employer, responding seriously and responsibly in their inquiries. The emerging wider ‘replication crisis’ in psychology encouraged their eventual interest, and today such scrutiny has intensified and has been afforded by technological changes. Now, but not in the 1990s, there are platforms, such as RetractionWatch and PubPeer, which have altered our sensitivity about publication probity.

Prior to this more recent historical scrutiny, it is pertinent that Eysenck produced his dissenting book Smoking, Health and Personality in the immediate wake of the Royal College of Physicians offering evidence of the link between smoking and cancer (Eysenck, 1965b: cf. Royal College of Physicians, 1962). The tobacco industry embarked then on a long campaign of damage limitation about their product.

Although Eysenck may have started with some financial encouragement, tobacco company sponsorship faded in explanatory significance with time, especially once he began to collaborate with Grossarth-Maticek. The latter had tried and failed to secure similar sponsorship; he was considered to be an unreliable maverick by the industry. The relationship with him did though shape another alteration in Eysenck's favoured version of psychology. He moved in the 1950s from eschewing psychological therapy to favouring behaviour therapy (the misleading notion of ‘first-wave CBT’). He had resisted the ‘cognitive’ turn in that tradition in the 1970s but now the collaboration paved the way for his change of mind. One of the most controversial implications of this shift was that he was effectively arguing that CBT could alter those at risk, whereas those without an assumed genetic risk (underlying their personality) could smoke with impunity.

What mattered now was the ideological and epistemological, not funding, aspects of their work together. The new collaborators promoted cognitive-behavioural interventions. If genetic proneness to cancer and addiction had a biogenetic source, then addictive behaviour and even the early treatment of those cancer-prone might still be modified environmentally. With this gene–environment picture established Eysenck could claim, with certainty, at the end of his sole authored 1988 paper that

there is now, however, too much empirical material to doubt that stress-strain, interacting with personality, plays a causal role in the genesis of cancer, probably in combination with such factors as smoking, drinking, etc. Details about this synergistic interplay still remain to be worked out, but it is clear that simplistic formulations like ‘Smoking causes cancer’ have no part to play in the scientific study of this disease. (Eysenck, 1988: 74)

However, that confident conclusion from Eysenck was subsequently problematised by the critics summarised by Pelosi and colleagues discussed earlier. They noted two major problems about Eysenck's assertions. The first was that the data supplied about causation (the differences in rates of disease in the cancer-prone and non-cancer-prone groups claimed) was so dramatic as to be implausible, in the context of the general medical literature about aetiology and pathogenesis. For example, Eysenck claimed that cancer-prone personalities had a risk of cancer 120 times greater than that of non-cancer-prone personalities. For heart disease the risk was increased by 25 times.

The second was that the data seeming to demonstrate the therapeutic success of the version of CBT for reducing cancer risk was also implausible, in the context of literature on usual comparisons between treated and untreated groups of patients with somatic symptoms, but note using psychological interventions. For example, Eysenck argued that the latter could reduce the death rate of disease-prone personalities over a 13-year period from 80% to 32%.

Eysenck then was inviting a similar posthumous controversy to that associated with his mentor Cyril Burt. Apart from them both being eugenicists prone to begging the question (to use the phrase favoured by Hearnshaw), Eysenck was testing out his own rhetoric about the power of ‘the facts’. For the latter to have been persuasive, ipso facto they had to be credible. If they failed to persuade, then the house of cards built by fact-seeking positivists, with Eysenck taking on the mantle of the Ward-Rivers position noted above, would soon collapse.

Discussion guided by critical realism

A resource from critical realism to detail the conditions of possibility, for any matter under scrutiny, is our four planar social being (or ‘social cube’; Bhaskar, 1993, 2016). This refers to a complex web of generative mechanisms, which may or may not be actualised, described by critical realists in four domains of laminated reality: the natural world; our interpersonal context; the social structures we are embedded in, across time and place; and finally our unique personalities.

All of the previous parts of the article can be read without reference to these underlying critical realist assumptions held by the author. However, here they are made explicit to offer the reader some more clarity about the antecedents relevant to the focus of the article. What must the world have been like for the above picture of Eysenck's work, and its controversial character, to emerge? In answering that question, the four planes noted will be used as subheadings.

Plane 1: The natural world

Our genes do afford us some possibilities and not others. In a contemporary example, men are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 as women because their Y chromosome tends to trigger a stronger auto-immune response to the virus (Moalem, 2020). Despite, after the 1960s, within social science biology being gradually eschewed, from ideological distaste, logically and empirically it could not disappear. As the Freudian tradition always maintained, biology held its position as the ground of our being to be discussed in one form or another (Benton, 1991).

This is a matter of ontology, whatever epistemic preferences we pursue in response. The postmodern turn of the 1980s created forms of radical social constructivism that backgrounded material reality. However, those linguistic preoccupations meant that the material extra-discursive dimension to human life (including our natal bodies) still remained. It cannot be talked out of existence, by discourses and discourses on discourses (Callinicos, 1991; Cromby and Nightingale, 1999).

Biological reductionism, not biology per se, has been the real pinch point for eugenics and its opponents. It came in as a political movement within European colonialism and capitalist expansion at the end of the 19th century. It emphasised the salience of our genes for the efficiency of modern societies; the case may have been overstated, but a case could be made.

What soon became problematic was the plausibility of these claims in the face of environmental forces and, more importantly, the empirical evidence about them. The latter empirical picture had to be conceded and then accounted for, in some form or other, as the Fisher-Hobden debate highlighted. The emergence of a form of environmentalism within eugenics, emphasised this reckoning about the non-genetic determinants of human life and fluxing societal arrangements, both current and prospective. The objections of committed biologists like Penrose and Haldane demonstrated that internal doubts about eugenics well preceded very recent political protests about eugenics.

We can add here the relevance of biology for our morbidity and mortality. For Eysenck to play the naysaying contrarian about smoking and ill health, the ontology of the latter had to be of existential and emotive relevance to ordinary people and their policymakers. Many people enjoyed the habit of smoking, but their health might be affected, and this mattered to them. Cancer and heart disease fit this picture about what people value about their health and longevity (Sayer, 2011).

Plane 2: Interpersonal relationships and culture

Turning to the second plane of the interpersonal, it is here that Eysenck's cultural marginality is relevant. However, he was not an isolate but relied on a community of practice. For example, most of the innovations of behaviour therapy in London were developed by others such as Jack Rachman, Vic Meyer, Monte Shapiro, and (for a while as a visitor) Joseph Wolpe. These men did much of the spade work in British applied methodological behaviourism in the 1950s and 1960s. Eysenck took much of the glory for these developments, even though he saw very few patients.

The other horse being ridden though by Eysenck was that of the psychology of individual differences in the Galtonian tradition (for example, his development of the Eysenck Personality Inventory). This did not go unchallenged by his contemporaries. For instance, Alice Heim was an important but less reported anti-eugenicist within post-war British psychology. She was Jewish but arrived from South Africa, not Germany. Heim challenged Eysenck's eugenic biases about personality and pointed out that ‘being born’ with a temperament or cognitive abilities had already entailed a key early environmental impact (intrauterine life). Her lesser remembered work at Cambridge on intelligence and its environmental determinants had ideological resonances with the LSE social science group (Heim, 1954, 1971). She is mentioned as a clear indication that eugenic presumptions were commonplace in the middle of the 20th century in Britain but they were not universal. Environmentalism would have to be incorporated, one way or another, into biogenetic reasoning or it would form an opposition to that reasoning.

Plane 3: The embedding wider social context

Turning to the third plane of social structural factors, Eysenck's work entailed the proposal of psychological technologies fit for the new welfare state, especially in the NHS. Given his presence in Britain under war conditions, this reminds us of the counter-narrative that it was more accurately a ‘warfare state’ (Edgerton, 2005). Eysenck would not have been present in Britain were in not for the second wave of hostilities between flagging colonial nations in the 20th century, nor would his formative time, designated as an enemy alien, have occurred. This rendered him as a curious onlooker to British culture and those leading it and may account for his reaction from that marginality (see the discussion below of his personal style).

The welfare state of the past 75 years, and its role in containing the contradictions of capitalist economies (Offe, 2000), was afforded and inflected in its origins by warfare. The promotion by Eysenck, post-war, of short techno-centric fixes to human distress (behaviour therapy and then CBT) was part of a wider movement of the ‘technological fix’ for all social problems. This was especially the case in new structures such as the NHS, which was formed in 1948, for a wide range of reasons of both equity and efficiency (Webster, 1988).

The latter author argues that the emergence and timing of NHS was over-determined by a wide range of structural and ideological forces during wartime and even before. Accordingly the common trope of it being created triumphantly by the British Labour Party is reductive. This same point about the long and complex wider development of the British welfare state, with those like Beveridge and Titmuss depicted at the helm, preceding the political watershed of the Second World War, is examined by Renwick (2016).

After the war, profit-inflected palliative habits in everyday life such as cigarette smoking became normative (see films from that era, in which the majority of adults used tobacco), even in the medical profession. In the 1950s this point about the pathological impact of a common habit was being reported by epidemiologists (Doll, 1954; Wynder and Graham, 1950). Eysenck's intervention in relation to this carcinogenic product then reflects a position, among others, about how psychology might respond to contemporary policy matters. His facts, fraudulent or not, were never ‘disinterested’. They marked a form of sponsored research into embedded habits of consumption, such as the legal recreational drugs of alcohol and tobacco, sold for profit.

The wider social context of the time also included translocated debates about human stasis and change, afforded by wartime conditions in London society. From south of the Thames at the IoP Eysenck, among others, countered the contemporary cultural cache of psychoanalysis, seven miles north in Hampstead. They offered instead a technological fix for neurosis that was short in duration and simple to teach and for patients to practise. This was to create an important trope about readily available forms of short-term therapy, which were relatively inexpensive, not ‘backward looking’ and could be researched (at least in single blind trials) as interventions, much like drugs (Clark, Ehlers, and McManus, 2003).

Within a generation, CBT was to become a central (New Labour) mental health policy for common forms of distress, promoted now by inheritors of the LSE tradition, such as the labour economist turned mental health expert Richard Layard (Layard et al., 2006). The latter, like Eysenck, came from a generation of leading scholars after the Second World War, confident in the prospect of a technological fix for social problems (Kranzberg, 1986).

Plane 4: Biographical uniqueness

In the fourth plane, Eysenck's unique personality can be considered. He enjoyed public recognition by popularising psychology (hence he was well known outside of the discipline) and by seeking controversy, for example about race and intelligence or the studies noted above about cancer. Because of his contrarian and abrasive approach to his work, he could see himself as a non-conformist (the ‘rebel with a cause’), which has been a view sustained consistently by his hagiographers (e.g. Corr, 2016; Gibson, 1981; cf. Hall and Scarnà, 2019).

However, when we look at the substance of his work, rather than his showy style, he was actually conforming to that compromise within the eugenic community of practice, between orthodox biogeneticists and social reformers. Despite his packed and productive career in the British academy, it was only after his death that the BPS formally recognised his status. His family and supporters in the field of personality and individual differences lobbied successfully to set up an annual memorial lecture in his honour. For a while this sat alongside the recognition of another eugenicist Charles Spearman. The latter had a medal named after him, awarded annually to the best new researcher in the discipline. However, at the turn of this century, this honouring of the Galtonian/UCL tradition in the BPS was to be short-lived.

As a sign of recent concerns about the eugenic history of British psychology, we can note that the Spearman medal was abandoned in 2020. Also, in 2021 UCL removed the names of Galton and Pearson from their lecture theatres and buildings. Prior to that, in 2015 the Eysenck Memorial Lecture was abandoned by the BPS, though it is not clear which of the emerging doubts about his scholarship were to trigger this organisational decision.

The eventual success of Anthony Pelosi and David Marks in encouraging the BPS to take its responsibilities seriously about Eysenck's work on personality and cancer can be placed in this wider cultural shift about historical reckonings, identity politics activism, and ‘decolonising the curriculum’. The doubts had been there and known since the 1990s, but both the BPS and the IoP remained unmoved, so this eventual shift itself may invite historical reflection in the future. Other factors noted earlier of relevance in explaining this shift are social media platforms querying academic probity and the ‘replication crisis’ within psychology and other disciplines.

This has been a slow process and a recent history dominated by silences and disciplinary inertia. Marks wrote to the chief executive of the BPS in 2018 about the need to review Eysenck's work and received no reply. After a prompt he eventually received an apology in 2021, and the disclosure that eventually the Society would be embarking on such a review (Marks, personal communication, February 2022). The membership of the BPS at the time of writing have not been formally informed of this incipient look-back exercise. It is flickering into activity 26 years after Pelosi had first raised the matter. Maybe Eysenck eventually pushed his enthusiasm for controversy just one step too far. Once the dust settles on the KCL and BPS inquiries, we will find out the verdict.

Conclusion

This article has described the range of ways in which the work of Hans Eysenck has been appraised, both before and after his death. The most recent and unresolved concern relates to the possible fraudulence of his work on smoking and morbidity. However, the full range of controversies reflects the wider context of his intellectual output during the middle of the 20th century and the shifting forms of legitimacy, both epistemological and political, that shaped and judged the work.

That context began with psychology emerging as new science breaking free from philosophy. Three interweaving epistemological currents dominated that period at the turn of the 20th century: empiricism, positivism, and eugenics. Eysenck joined those currents of influence in the 1930s and conformed loyally to their strictures. Indeed, he embraced their implications with gusto and promoted their implications as a public intellectual enthusiastically.

By 1949 his loyal acculturation entailed him offering an ‘English’ viewpoint about clinical training in his adoptive city of London. Without the Second World War his very presence in England would have been unlikely and his role as an intruding and suspect outsider (‘enemy alien’) would have been absent. Eysenck was part of a wider trend of conservative immigrants rejuvenating a flagging culture of British empiricism.

In the immediate post-war years his mixed commitment to both mainstream eugenics, reflected in his psychometric interest in individual differences, and applied methodological behaviourism, reflected in his promotion of behaviour therapy, was aligned with wider reformist compromises in British eugenics, either side of the war years. The eventual acceptance of behaviour therapy, as a solution to neurosis, was consistent with a wider confidence in the technological fix for social problems in the wake of the war.

By the 1970s that scientific confidence was still present, traceable to those preceding Eysenck in the British academy before the 1930s. However, its legitimacy began to fracture for a range of reasons. Changes in the philosophy of science, led by another émigré, Karl Popper, along with questions about the conservative role of science from activists in New Social Movements, left old positivist certainties exposed. That process of delegitimation of the early style of psychological orthodoxy in the first part of the 20th century continued unabated. By the 1980s, with the postmodern turn, this created a crisis for the discipline. ‘Methodologism’, or the methodological imperative, emerged then as an adaptation to sustain a seeming disciplinary coherence, in the wake of incommensurable forms of theory development.

Eysenck's work was thus highly conformist, if judged by the norms of the new discipline of British psychology in the first half of the 20th century. However, his bullish advocacy of those norms in the second part of the 20th century began to look out of place, given the wider expectations of social progress in British society. His work provoked the ire of gay and anti-racist activists. His views on smoking were contrarian and partly, but not only, explained by industrial sponsorship. However, his deeper loyalty to his adapted version of eugenics to accommodate behaviour therapy were also part of his continued insistence that public health messages were simplistic and misleading.

If Eysenck was ‘rebelling’, then it was not against a waning tradition (pace Ward and Rivers) but against the attacks from critics of psychological expertise, who noted its value-laden character. The latter critics undermined the credibility of his view that ‘in science only one thing matters, and that is the facts’. That phrase from Eysenck not only reflected a lack of insight into science, especially human science, being a value-inflected social activity, now accepted in post-Popperian versions of the philosophy of science. It also would look particularly hollow if those facts were implausible, within the standard expectations of the older positivist tradition.

A remaining question for historians is why a full and proper academic appraisal of Eysenck's work has taken so long. One possible answer is that institutions, in this case his academic employers and the BPS, were for decades juggling academic integrity and reputational damage limitation. As part of the Galtonian tradition, Eysenck may be open to critical scrutiny from managers, who are attuned to consumer demand, in the recent febrile context of identity politics. The latter style of ‘bottom-up’ protest may succeed where traditional requests for evidence-based critical reviews from those like Anthony Pelosi in the 1990s failed.