Hans Eysenck: personality and fatal diseases; exposing a scientific scandal by Dr Anthony Pelosi

About the speaker

Dr Anthony Pelosi is a consultant psychiatrist at Priory Hospital Glasgow. Since the early ‘90s, Pelosi has published extensive critiques of the work of Hans Eysenck, In February 2019, Pelosi published a paper in the Journal of Health Psychology, in which he stated that the Eysenck case is “one of the worst scientific scandals of all time,” which was also accompanied by an editorial from David Marks, in which he called for an inquiry by King’s College London and the British Psychological Society.

About the talk

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, the late Hans Eysenck conducted a programme of research into the causes, prevention and treatment of cancer and other fatal diseases in collaboration with one of his protégés, Ronald Grossarth-Maticek. This led to what must be the most astonishing series of findings ever published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. I am going to present just a selection of these findings. I will also summarise a study in which these scientists describe in detail – and without a trace of insight – a criminally negligent clinical experiment on 41 people who were at grave and imminent risk due to malignant hypertension.

I will be asking the RIOT Science Club what I have been asking myself for three decades. How on earth could this work have been published and why was nothing done about it until last year? I will be making a few suggestions.  i) Professor Eysenck considered himself to be some sort of genius. Over the years, he managed to beguile numerous young researchers who egged him on in this belief. Some of them still try to defend his work on fatal diseases. ii) He was encouraged to continue this research by tobacco company scientists even when they knew that it was so flawed. iii) Eysenck thought of himself as the world’s greatest psychometrician. However, he had only a loose and fluctuating grasp of the difference between statistical significance and effect size. iv) His university and his regulatory body were not up to the task of dealing with such a person.

I will be asking for suggestions about how to undo some of the damage to science that has been caused by this scandal.