| Hans Eysenck | |
|---|---|
Hans Jürgen Eysenck
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| Born | March 4, 1916 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | September 4, 1997 (aged 81) London |
| Citizenship | British |
| Nationality | German |
| Fields | Psychology |
| Institutions | Institute of Psychiatry |
| Alma mater | University College London (UCL) |
| Doctoral advisor | Cyril Burt |
| Doctoral students | Jeffrey Alan Gray, Donald Prell |
| Known for | intelligence, personality, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, differential psychology, education, psychiatry, behavior therapy |
Hans Jürgen Eysenck (March 4, 1916 – September 4, 1997) was a German-British psychologist who spent most of his career in Britain, best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, though he worked in a wide range of areas. At the time of his death, Eysenck was the living psychologist most frequently cited in science journals.[1]
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Hans Eysenck was born in Berlin, Germany, his mother a film star (Helga Molander) and his father a nightclub entertainer, once voted 'handsomest man on the Baltic coast'.[2] (p8-11). Eysenck was brought up by his grandmother, who was a fervent Catholic, though of Jewish ancestry - a fact he did not know until after her death in a concentration camp [2](p. 80) An initial move to England in the 1930s became permanent due to his opposition to the Nazi party. "My hatred of Hitler and the Nazis, and all they stood for, was so overwhelming that no argument could counter it."(p 40) [2] Because of his German citizenship, he was initially unable to gain employment, and was almost interned during the war.[3] 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.[2] (pp. 118–119).
Eysenck was Professor of Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College, London (a constituent college of the federal University of London), from 1955 to 1983. He was a major contributor to the modern scientific theory of personality and a brilliant teacher who helped found treatment for mental illnesses.[4][5] He was the founding editor of the journal Personality and Individual Differences, and authored about 80 books and over 1600 journal articles.[6] His son Michael Eysenck is also a noted psychology professor. Hans Eysenck died of a brain tumor[7] in a London hospice in 1997.[8]
Examples of publications in which Eysenck's views have roused controversy include (chronologically):
Eysenck’s attitude was summarised in his autobiography Rebel with a Cause (Transaction Publishers (1997), ISBN 1-56000-938-1): "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."
By far the most acrimonious of the debates has been that over the role of genetics in IQ differences (see intelligence quotient#Genetics vs environment), which led to Eysenck famously being punched on the nose by a female protestor during a talk at the London School of Economics,[10] as well as bomb threats, and threats to kill his young children.[11] This opposition came when he supported Arthur Jensen's questioning of whether variation in IQ between racial groups was entirely environmental. (see race and intelligence).[12]
Eysenck thought the media gave the misleading impression that his views were those of a maverick outside the mainstream scientific consensus and cited The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy as showing that there was majority support for every single one of the main contentions he had put forward, further asserting that the idea there was any real debate about the matter among the relevant scientists was incorrect.[13][14]
Some of Eysenck's later work was funded from the Pioneer Fund, an organization often criticized for promoting scientific racism[15][16][17] [18] for which Eysenck was also criticised.[19]
He also received 'secret' funding for 'consultation research' via New York legal firm Jacob & Medinger which was acting on behalf of the tobacco industry. Asked what he felt about tobacco industry lawyers being involved in selecting scientists for research projects, he said: "As long as somebody pays for the research I don't care who it is." Research should be judged on quality not on who paid for it, he said, adding that he had not personally profited from the funds. (example document here, via tobaccodocuments.org) http://tobaccodocuments.org/bliley_lor/03747086-7087.html. According to the UK newspaper The Independent, Eysenck received more than £800k in this way (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/eysenck-took-pounds-800000-tobacco-funds-1361007.html) - though, interviewed by UK's Channel 4 TV in 1996, he "could not remember exactly the source... " of the money.
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: "that 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."[20]
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 2-dimensional space to describe individual differences in behaviour. An analogy can be made to how latitude and longitude describe a point on the face of the earth. Also, Eysenck noted how these two dimensions were similar to the four personality types first proposed by the Greek physician Hippocrates.
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,e.g., Eysenck & Eysenck, 1976 [21] who is the current editor of Personality and Individual Differences.
The major strength of Eysenck's model was to provide detailed theory of the causes of personality. For example, Eysenck proposed that extraversion was caused by variability in cortical arousal: "introverts are characterized by higher levels of activity than extraverts and so are chronically more cortically aroused than extraverts".[22] While it seems counterintuitive to suppose that introverts are more aroused than extraverts, the putative effect this has on behaviour is such that the introvert seeks lower levels of stimulation. Conversely, the extravert seeks to heighten his or her arousal to a more favourable level (as predicted by the Yerkes-Dodson Law) by increased activity, social engagement and other stimulation-seeking behaviors.
Jeffrey Alan Gray, a former student of Eysenck's, developed a comprehensive alternative theoretical interpretation of the biological and psychological data studied by Eysenck – leaning more heavily on animal and learning models. Currently, the most widely used model of personality is Big Five model (see big five personality traits) (Costa & McCrae, 1985). The traits in the Big Five are as follows:
Extraversion and Neuroticism in the Big Five are very similar to Eysenck's traits of the same name. However, what Eysenck calls the trait of Psychoticism corresponds to two traits in the Big Five model: Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. Eysenck's personality system did not address Openness to experience. He argued that his approach was a better description of personality (Eysenck, 1992a; 1992b).
Eysenck's theory of personality is closely linked with the scales that he and his co-workers developed. These include the Maudsley Medical Questionnaire, Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI), Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) and Sensation Seeking Scale (developed in conjunction with Marvin Zuckerman). The Eysenck Personality Profiler (EPP) breaks down different facets of each trait considered in the model. There has been some debate about whether these facets should include impulsivity as a facet of extraversion as Eysenck declared in his early work; or psychoticism. Eysenck declared for the latter, in later work.
In 1994 he was one of 52 signatories on "Mainstream Science on Intelligence,[23] " an editorial written by Linda Gottfredson and published in the Wall Street Journal, which declared the consensus of the signing scholars on issues related to race and intelligence following the publication of the book The Bell Curve. Gottfredson described the drafting of the statements on intelligence and process of gathering signatures on that document in a 1997 editorial in the journal Intelligence.[24] Eysenck includes the entire text of the 1994 editorial (including the lead paragraphs mentioning the book The Bell Curve and twenty-five propositions about human intelligence) in his 1998 book Intelligence: A New Look, saying, "I did not find any particular discrepancies between my account" and the statements in that editorial.[25]
Eysenck made early contributions to fields such as personality by express and explicit commitment to a very rigorous adherence to scientific methodology, as Eysenck believed that scientific methodology was required for progress in personality psychology. He used, for example, factor analysis, a statistical method, to support his personality model. An example is Inheritance of Neuroticism: An Experimental Study, quoted above. His early work showed Eysenck to be an especially strong critic of psychoanalysis as a form of therapy, preferring behaviour therapy. He was particularly critical of Freud and his methods and wrote a book criticizing them titled The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire. Despite this strongly scientific interest, Eysenck did not shy, in later work, from giving attention to parapsychology and astrology. Indeed, he believed that empirical evidence supported the existence of paranormal abilities.[26]
H.B. Gibson (Tony Gibson), who worked with Eysenck at the Institute of Psychiatry, has published a biography of him.[27] A critical biography of Eysenck was published by Roderick Buchanan in 2010 ('Playing with Fire: the Controversial Career of Hans J. Eysenck', Oxford U. Press) -- reviewed equally critically by Chris Brand in 2011.[28]
There are five portraits of Eysenck[29] in the National Portrait Gallery permanent collection, including works by Anne-Katrin Purkiss and Elliott and Fry.